OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sympathizes with Gen Zers entering the job market. It’s just unfortunate that the AI tools he’s responsible for ushering into the world are completely upending the nature of work and finding a job.
“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,” Altman said in an interview with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, as quoted by Fortune.
This, according to Altman, actually presents an opportunity. He argues that all the tumult caused by AI is a good thing, as it gives ambitious Gen Zers who are willing to embrace AI an opportunity to catapult their careers or launch a business.
“I think you want to be starting your career at a time of the highest degree of change,” Altman said.
He then dissed Gen Zers who aren’t getting with the times.
“My chronic disappointment with MBA students is that they always want to go do the thing that was cool five years ago and not do the new thing,” Altman said. “I think this is a great time to go do the new thing.”
But the interviewer pointed out the obvious flaw in Altman’s logic.
“So go do the new thing, even if AI is the cool thing right now,” she said almost incredulously, eliciting a roar of laughter from the crowd.
The thing is, AI isn’t that far away from being what was “cool five years ago.” The excitement that bubbled from ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, and the wave of AI optimism in the year that followed, feels like it happened a lifetime ago. After that, public opinion on AI quickly began to sour. Artists and tastemakers certainly didn’t embrace it. But businesses rapidly integrated AI tools in an effort to economize their operations, automate tasks, surveil workers, and justify layoffs.
In short, AI is no longer “cool,” if it ever was. It’s now an inescapable part of our reality. Basically every programmer uses AI at work. Jobseekers are interviewed by AI models.
It’s so pervasive now that even tech founders are getting sick of it; Paul Graham, the cofounder of startup accelerator Y Combinator, acted as a weathervane when he said that he views AI writing in the pitches he receives as a sign of laziness.
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