Sam Altman's 'Chronic Disappointment': Gen Z Should Bet on AI, Not Yesterday

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says "wide swaths" of today's jobs will be handled entirely by AI—and he's openly frustrated that young workers keep chasing what "was cool five years ago" instead of building what's next.

In an interview last week with Stanford's Graduate School of Business, Altman delivered a blunt message to Gen Z entering a job market being reshaped by AI: the disruption is accelerating, but ambitious workers who ditch the old playbook can come out ahead.

"It's totally true that huge numbers of tasks that people do today will be done better, cheaper, and faster by AI—and completely differently," Altman said.

He also cautioned against panic. The transformation, he said, won't happen as quickly as many people expect. But the direction is clear, and the upheaval creates openings for workers willing to ask what new businesses could be built with AI.

"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."

Why does Altman call this a rare window for founders?

For Altman, the opportunity goes beyond standing out in the job market. He believes AI opens the door to businesses that were difficult—or impossible—to build just a few years ago.

"There are many companies that can be built on top of the technology OpenAI has put out into the world that will be much bigger and, I hope, more important than OpenAI," he said.

Altman speaks from founder experience. In 2005, he dropped out of Stanford, where he studied computer science, to cofound Loopt, a location-based social networking startup that was later acquired. He then joined startup accelerator Y Combinator and served as its president from 2014 to 2019.

His advice to students starting out now: timing matters more than comfort.

"If you're heading into the world right now to work on something, I think you want to start your career at a time of the greatest change, when the playing field is most open," Altman told Stanford students.

"I think people with high potential, drive, ideas, a new way of looking at things, and new skills tend to do relatively well when the ground is shaking the most."

The numbers suggest Americans are already listening. In 2025, they filed 5.7 million applications to start new businesses, the highest annual total in the two decades the Census Bureau has tracked the data.

Who else says AI gives entrepreneurs an edge?

Altman isn't alone. Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit cofounder who traces that company's origin to a Waffle House visit when he was 19, has argued that founders building with AI from day one hold a structural advantage: they aren't retrofitting the technology into an older business.

"Anyone who has started a company in the last two years has been building a company in the AI age, and they are at a default advantage, because the DNA of their organization is in this new world," Ohanian told Fortune last year.

"There are folks very hungry right now who are building new companies, who are ready to drink the milkshake of so many incumbents," he said. "That founding DNA makes a huge difference in how well they're going to be able to execute, how well they're going to be able to build."

Billionaire entrepreneur and former Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban has urged entrepreneurs to treat AI as a competitive necessity, not an optional extra.

"If you're not using [AI] to move faster or make smarter decisions, you're behind," Cuban told Fortune in 2025.

"[AI isn't] just a tool, it's leverage," Cuban said. "The most successful entrepreneur will understand how to properly use AI."

What's the takeaway for Gen Z workers?

The message from three of tech's most prominent voices converges on one point: AI is rewriting career arithmetic, and speed of adoption—not pedigree—is becoming the differentiator. Altman's bet is that the next decade's biggest companies don't exist yet, and the founders who build them will be the ones who started while the ground was still shaking.