Sam Altman's "Chronic Disappointment" In MBA Students

ChatGPT maker OpenAI's co-founder and CEO Sam Altman has a bone to pick with MBA students.

"My chronic disappointment with MBA students is that they always want to just go do the thing that was cool five years ago and not do the new thing," Altman told the Stanford Graduate School of Business last week.

"I think this is a great time to go do the new thing." 

Altman's remarks come on the back of AI tools becoming increasingly capable of performing tasks that have traditionally required human workers, raising nervous questions about the future of jobs and employment even as AI opens up new possibilities for entrepreneurs.

He acknowledged that the transition would not happen as quickly as some expect. However, he warned that large parts of existing jobs, at least as they are performed today, could eventually be handled entirely by AI.

"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." 

For young professionals entering the workforce, Altman sees the AI disruption as an opportunity rather than a threat.

"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.

Why Altman Thinks This Is The Time To Build

Altman believes AI could allow entrepreneurs to build companies that would have been difficult, or even impossible, to create just a few years ago.
"There are many companies that can be built on top of technology that OpenAI has put out into the world that will be much bigger and, I hope, more important than OpenAI," he said.

His belief is already being validated. Rival Anthropic just announced that it had acquired a "one-person startup" called MIthril Medicine where the founder Cody Tranbarger self- admittedly used "a whole lot of Claude" along with help from outside consultants and contract research labs to find a possible cure for a rare genetic muscle disorder.

READ | A One-Person Startup Just Got Bought By Anthropic

There's also a growing number of entrepreneurs already running million-dollar businesses with little or no staff, relying heavily on AI to write code, answer customer queries, automate marketing, process refunds and handle routine operations.

Altman's message to the youth in many ways is consistent with his own career. Altman dropped out of Stanford in 2005 to co-found Loopt, a location-based social networking startup, before going on to lead startup accelerator Y Combinator.

His advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to look beyond established business models at a time when the technology itself is changing rapidly.
India Inc captains, startup founders as well as prominent global leaders have also spoken about a scenario where even if jobs are disrupted by AI, it could spawn a whole new generation of entrepreneurs who'll be able to launch and scale quickly thanks to AI tools.

The scale of the disruption is already becoming apparent in some industries.

Citadel CEO Ken Griffin recently said the company's new agentic AI system can reproduce complex financial research in two to three hours, a task that usually takes employees with master's and PhD-level qualifications six to eight weeks.

Agentic AI refers to systems that can carry out multi-step tasks autonomously, with limited human intervention.

Rajeev Rastogi, Vice President of Machine Learning at Amazon, had made a similar point about the potential for AI to automate work across companies in an interview with this writer earlier this year.

"Today we do a lot of things in every company that are done manually. It will all be replaced by AI so it could be the same use case but also doing it with a lot less cost and with a lot less effort," Rastogi said.

But automation is only one side of the story. Griffin believes the same technology could give entrepreneurs the ability to build businesses and challenge established companies at a speed that was previously difficult to imagine.

"Entrepreneurs will be able to launch new businesses at breathtaking speeds. And will be able to take on incumbents in ways that you just couldn't do five, 10, 15, 20 years ago," Griffin said.

Agentic AI could also allow entrepreneurs to run businesses with "just a few people" instead of teams of 30-40, he added.

Griffin expects more such businesses to emerge as entrepreneurs begin using AI to identify customer needs and build solutions around them.

READ | As AI Takes Jobs, Could It Also Create A New Generation Of Entrepreneurs?

Coming back to Altman's criticism of MBA students - at a time when AI is changing both the cost of building a business and what a small team can accomplish, the real opportunities may very well lie in figuring out what can be built today, rather than replicating traditional corporate success paths.