Gen Z is walking into a job market that artificial intelligence is already reshaping, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the shake-up is only getting started.
His advice for young workers is to stop chasing yesterday’s dream jobs and start betting on what comes next.
That message landed with a jab at some of the country’s most ambitious students. It also comes as entry-level hiring has fallen sharply at big tech firms, leaving many new graduates with fewer obvious paths in.
Altman expresses his “chronic disappointment” with MBA students
Altman made his remarks in an interview released on Oct. 21 as part of Stanford GSB’s “View From The Top” series, where MBA student Claudia Chen asked him about AI and the future of work, according to Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“It’s totally true that huge numbers of tasks that people do today will be done better, cheaper, and faster by AI, and completely differently,” he said.
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He went further. Altman said “wide swaths” of today’s jobs, at least as they’re done now, will be handled entirely by AI, as Fortune reported. But he also cautioned that the transformation won’t happen as quickly as many people expect. That slower timeline matters for anyone planning a career around the change.
Then came the line that grabbed headlines. “My 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,” Altman said, adding, “I think this is a great time to go do the new thing.”
His frustration speaks to a real tension for young workers. Companies that adopted generative AI cut junior employment by about 7.7% within six quarters, while senior jobs held steady, according to a Harvard working paper.
The safe, well-worn career path may not be as safe as it looks.
Why Altman thinks the jobs playing field is wide open
For Altman, the upside goes beyond standing out in a tough job market. He believes AI could make it possible to build companies that would have been hard or impossible just a few years ago.
“There 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,” he said, according to Fortune.
He speaks from experience. Altman left Stanford, where he studied computer science, to cofound the location-sharing app Loopt, which launched in 2005 and was later bought by Green Dot for $43.4 million, as TheStreet reported.
He later became president of startup accelerator Y Combinator in 2014 and stepped down in 2019 to focus on OpenAI.
That background shapes how he sees the moment. “If you’re 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,” Altman told the Stanford audience.
Altman added during the same conversation that “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.”
In other words, he thinks disruption tends to reward people who are willing to move first. That’s easier said than done for graduates carrying student loans, but it’s the core of his pitch to a new generation of founders.
More young Americans are taking the entrepreneurship leap
Plenty of people seem to agree. Americans filed 5.7 million applications to start new businesses in 2025, a record high for the decade analyzed, based on Census Bureau data.
Gen Z stands out, with 51% saying they had seriously considered starting a business in the past 12 months, compared with 27% of all Americans surveyed.
That itch hasn’t gone away in 2026. Americans filed roughly 535,000 business applications in September alone, a little more than in August after seasonal adjustments, according to the Census Bureau.
It seems that in a year packed with layoff headlines and AI anxiety, plenty of people are still betting on themselves.
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Other well-known founders have made a similar pitch. Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has urged entrepreneurs to spend “every waking minute learning about AI,” arguing that “whatever skills you have, you can use AI to amplify them.”
There’s a catch, though. When Goldman Sachs studied employment across more than 800 occupations, it found the drag from AI landed hardest on people at the very start of their careers, TheStreet reported.
U.S. call-center jobs alone were running 39% below their long-run trend. So the same technology Altman sees as a launchpad is also making that first rung harder to reach.
What it means for young workers
Recent graduates have run straight into that wall. The New York Fed’s numbers show unemployment for college grads aged 22 to 27 at 5.6%, according to TheStreet.
And layoffs aren’t really the main story. In a June GMAC survey, one in three employers said they had used AI to cover some entry-level work instead of hiring someone new. Clearly, a lot of first jobs are quietly disappearing.
That doesn’t mean everyone should drop out and launch a startup. Altman himself said he doesn’t expect a job apocalypse, even as many tasks and some kinds of jobs change.
The bigger takeaway is about mindset.
Altman’s warning isn’t really about MBA students alone. It’s that the jobs that looked cool five years ago may not be the ones that pay off five years from now, and the people who adapt early could have the most to gain.
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