{"id":659821,"date":"2026-10-28T18:22:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T18:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/659821\/"},"modified":"2026-10-28T18:22:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T18:22:11","slug":"sam-altman-shares-his-chronic-disappointment-in-gen-z-theyre-stuck-on-what-was-cool-five-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/659821\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Altman shares his \u2018chronic disappointment\u2019 in Gen Z\u2014they\u2019re stuck on what \u2018was cool five years ago’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gen Z is entering a job market being turned upside down by AI\u2014and according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman<\/a>, the disruption is only getting started. But he thinks ambitious young workers have a chance to come out ahead if they\u2019re willing to ditch the playbook and bet on what\u2019s next.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s totally true that huge numbers of tasks that people do today will be done better, cheaper, and faster by AI\u2014and completely differently,\u201d Altman said in an interview<\/a> last week with Stanford\u2019s Graduate School of Business.<\/p>\n

In turn, \u201cwide swaths\u201d of current jobs, at least as they\u2019re done today, will be entirely handled by AI, Altman said. While he also cautioned that the transformation won\u2019t happen as quickly as many people expect, the upheaval could create opportunities for ambitious workers willing to try something different by considering what new businesses could be built with AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy 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,\u201d Altman said. \u201cI think this is a great time to go do the new thing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

AI is creating a rare window for entrepreneurs: \u2018The playing field is most open,\u2019 Altman says<\/p>\n

For Altman, that opportunity goes beyond finding a way to stand out in the job market. He believes AI could open the door to businesses that would have been difficult\u2014or impossible\u2014to build just a few years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Altman knows a thing or two about building a company from scratch. In 2005, he dropped out of Stanford<\/a>, where he was studying computer science, to cofound Loopt, a location-based social networking startup that was later acquired.<\/p>\n

He went on to join startup accelerator Y Combinator<\/a>, serving as its president from 2014 to 2019. Now, he sees AI as a chance for a new generation of founders to tackle problems that once seemed out of reach.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re 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,\u201d Altman said to Stanford students.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

More Americans are already taking that entrepreneurial leap<\/a>. In 2025, they filed 5.7 million applications to start new businesses, the highest annual total<\/a> in the two decades the Census Bureau has tracked the data.<\/p>\n

Alexis Ohanian and Mark Cuban agree that AI is giving entrepreneurs a leg up<\/p>\n

Other prominent founders and investors have echoed that AI is giving a new generation of ambitious entrepreneurs an advantage.<\/p>\n

Alexis Ohanian<\/a>, who tracks the origins of Reddit back to a Waffle House<\/a> visit when he was 19, has made a similar argument: Founders who build with AI from day one have an edge because they aren\u2019t trying to retrofit the technology into an older business.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnyone 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,\u201d he told Fortune last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are folks very hungry right now who are building new companies, who are ready to drink the milkshake of so many incumbents. That founding DNA makes a huge difference in how well they\u2019re going to be able to execute, how well they\u2019re going to be able to build.\u201d<\/p>\n

Billionaire entrepreneur and former Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban<\/a> has also urged entrepreneurs to treat AI as a competitive advantage\u2014not an optional extra.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re not using [AI] to move faster or make smarter decisions, you\u2019re behind,\u201d Cuban told Fortune<\/a> in 2025.<\/p>\n

\u201c[AI isn\u2019t] just a tool, it\u2019s leverage. If you\u2019re not using AI to move quicker and make smarter decisions, you\u2019re at a disadvantage,\u201d Cuban said. \u201cThe most successful entrepreneur will understand how to properly use AI.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gen Z is entering a job market being turned upside down by AI\u2014and according to OpenAI CEO Sam…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659822,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,32222,30568,6373,2502,293,11542,4197,85,46,12311,1748,3000,2045,125,11145],"class_list":["post-659821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-career-advancement","tag-career-success","tag-careers","tag-entrepreneurs","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-founders","tag-gen-z","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-mba","tag-openai","tag-sam-altman","tag-students","tag-technology","tag-the-future-of-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}