Sam Altman: Gen Z stuck chasing what was cool five years ago

Altman's remarks came in an interview with Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and they build on a theme he has sounded before: that AI will remake how work is done rather than simply speed up existing tasks. He told students that huge numbers of tasks will be done better, cheaper, and faster by AI—and completely differently—while also cautioning that the shift won't arrive as quickly as many expect. That combination of sweeping change and slow timing is what he frames as an opening for people starting out now.

His own path runs through exactly that kind of bet. Altman dropped out of Stanford in 2005 to cofound Loopt, a location-based social networking startup later acquired, and went on to serve as president of startup accelerator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019. Against that backdrop, his claim that companies built on OpenAI's technology could be 'much bigger and, I hope, more important than OpenAI' reads as an argument that the next generation of founders has room above the current platform companies.

Altman is placed alongside other investors making a similar case. Alexis Ohanian told Fortune that founders who have started companies in the last two years are at a 'default advantage' because the DNA of their organizations is in the AI age, and Mark Cuban said entrepreneurs who don't use AI to move faster or make smarter decisions are behind. The broader backdrop is a rise in new-business formation: 5.7 million applications to start businesses in 2025, the highest annual total in the two decades the Census Bureau has tracked the data.