OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he is envious of today’s college dropouts. Speaking at the DevDay conference, he explained that this is due to the numerous opportunities available for building products in the AI space. In an interview with Rowan Cheung, Altman said: “I’m envious of the current generation of 20-year-old dropouts. Because the amount of stuff you can build, the opportunity in this space is so incredibly wide.” Altman added that he hasn’t “had, like, a real chunk of free mental space in a couple of years to think hard about what I would build, but I know that there would be a lot of cool stuff to build.”Altman dropped out of Stanford University in 2005 after two years of studying computer science. He left the university at 19 to cofound Loopt, a location-sharing social media app, and went through startup accelerator Y Combinator. After the app was acquired, he became president of YC and later cofounded OpenAI.Silicon Valley has long celebrated college dropouts, with big names like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg setting the trend.According to Business Insider, two main reasons are pushing more people to leave college early or skip it altogether. First, higher education has become extremely costly; in some cases, a four-year degree can cost over $500,000. Second, rapid progress in AI and the availability of easy-to-use coding tools are making it more straightforward to start a business without requiring deep technical knowledge.
In April, defence tech company Palantir introduced the Meritocracy Fellowship, a four-month paid program for recent high school graduates who aren’t attending college.In a March blog post, Andreessen Horowitz investors wrote: “The playing field has levelled for younger founders, making it the best time in a decade for dropouts and recent graduates to start a company.”Similarly, YC partner Jared Friedman noted on X: “2 years ago, only 10% of the YC batch was college students or new grads. The last batch was 30%. Because of AI, it’s the best time in a decade for college students to start startups.”
What Sam Altman said about facing difficulty advising startups
In the interview, Altman also stated that he has difficulty advising founders on the unique advantages they should leverage. He said the benefits should be customised to the startup’s product, technology, and its position in the industry at the time and place. Startups should figure it out as they go, Altman said.Referring to ChatGPT’s memory feature, which the company did not initially plan, Altman explained: “If you had asked me when we started ChatGPT what our enduring advantages were going to be. I would have said, ‘I have no idea. So you start building features and then sometimes something emerges that’s like, ‘Oh, this can be a really durable advantage for us.”