Memorandum
- From
- Caroline Mercer via Fast Company
- Date
- Filed
- Business·3 min to read
- Re
Altman says MBA students chase yesterday's trends instead of new ideas
ReAltman says MBA students chase yesterday's trends instead of new ideas
OpenAI chief Sam Altman, a Y Combinator alumnus and startup founder, told Stanford Graduate School of Business students that he is disappointed by MBA graduates who favor trends from five years ago. He argued that AI will change jobs but not cause a job apocalypse, and that the best time to start a career is during the greatest upheaval.
Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator, says he has a «chronic disappointment» with MBA students, who in his view tend to chase opportunities that were popular years ago instead of trying something new. Speaking in an interview for Stanford's Graduate School of Business, Altman said the current period is a strong moment for founders to pursue fresh ideas.
«My chronic disappointment with MBA students is that they always want to go do the thing that was cool five years ago rather than try something new,» Altman said. «I think this is a great time to go do the new thing.» He cautioned against launching another copy of OpenAI, but said many companies could be built on top of the technology OpenAI has released, and he expressed hope that some of them would become bigger and more important than OpenAI itself.
Altman, who founded the social network Loopt at age 20 and has helped launch dozens of other startups, also pushed back on warnings that artificial intelligence will wipe out jobs. Although he has previously acknowledged that AI could lead to catastrophic outcomes, he said he does not expect a job apocalypse of the kind many people describe. «It is totally true that huge numbers of tasks that are done today by people will be done better, cheaper, faster, completely differently by AI,» he said. «And it's also true that wide swaths of current jobs, the way they're done today, at least, will be entirely done by AI.»
Altman framed that level of change as an opportunity rather than a setback. «If you are heading into the world right now to go work on something, I think you want to be starting your career at a time of the highest degree of change, and you want the most open playing field,» he said. He added that people with high potential, drive, new skills and new ways of looking at problems tend to do best «when the ground is shaking the most.»
Altman does not hold an MBA himself. He dropped out of Stanford University after two years of studying computer science to found Loopt, saying he was sad to leave a school he loved but worried he would stop learning. He described startup work as the highest-rate learning environment he has experienced, and he repeated advice he received as a young founder: «You will get an entire MBA in one month of doing a startup.» He said he cannot confirm that claim from direct experience, but noted that he learned quickly about business, products, customers and sales in ways he believes school could not have taught him.
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