OpenAI’s Sam Altman shares tips for students and young professionals, ‘be more open for…’

OpenAI's Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Sam Altman, shared suggestions for students and young professionals about being more open to unconventional career paths and taking the right risks, Hindustan Times reported on Monday, September 23.

Altman said that the traditional route of going to college, then getting a job, and staying there “forever” may not be the most financially secure option anymore.

“Now I think the traditional path is, I won’t say falling apart, but it’s quite challenged. And AI will probably disrupt things even more and put more variants in the traditional path,” Altman said as per the HT report.

Altman also discussed taking the right risks and shared his own reference to co-founding OpenAI. He said that it is pertinent to take the right risks, but that does not mean that one should avoid taking them altogether.

“The risky thing is to not go try the things that might really work out because regret can kick in. You kind of look back at your career 10, 20, 30 years later and say, ‘Man, I wish I had tried the thing I really wanted to try. You should just put a huge premium on doing that anytime you feel like you might say that later,” Altman said.

The OpenAI Chief dropped out of Stanford to build a location-based social networking application called Loopt before co-founding OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Altman said in an interview that at that time it “seemed like a really fun thing to try,” as he was able to afford to take the risk with the assurance that he could always fall back to his education if things didn't go as planned.

“That’s the key to most risk, is most things are not a one-way door. You can try something, it doesn’t work out, you can undo it, you can do something else,” said Sam Altman.