Even as Gen Z struggles with hiring freezes and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-fuelled job anxieties, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he’s jealous of them, especially the ones bold enough to drop out.
“I’m envious of the current generation of 20-year-old dropouts,” Altman said during an interview with Rowan Cheung at OpenAI’s DevDay conference on Monday, October 6, adding, “Because the amount of stuff you can build, the opportunity in this space is so incredibly wide.”
Altman, who himself dropped out of Stanford University in 2005 after two years of studying computer science, knows a thing or two about risk-taking. He left college at 19 to co-found Loopt, a location-sharing social app that later went through Y Combinator (YC), the famed startup accelerator he eventually led as president before going on to cofound OpenAI.
Reflecting on the pace of innovation, Altman admitted he hasn’t had the mental bandwidth “in a couple of years to think hard about what I would build.” But if he did, he said, there would be “a lot of cool stuff to build, reported Business Insider.
“Ideas emerge over time”
When asked what gives startups an edge, Altman said there’s no universal formula. “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,’” he said. He explained that sometimes, the best features, like ChatGPT’s memory function, just emerge over time.
In Silicon Valley, college dropouts have long held near-mythical status, thanks to names like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey.
And that trend seems to be picking up again. With the cost of higher education skyrocketing, some four-year degrees now topping $500,000, and AI tools lowering technical barriers, young founders are diving into startups earlier than ever.
Meanwhile, companies like Palantir are also catching on, launching programs like the Meritocracy Fellowship, a four-month paid internship for high school graduates who chose not to go to college.
For Altman, the envy isn’t about skipping school, but about freedom, the freedom to build without limits. And in today’s AI-powered world, that might just be the most valuable education of all.