OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said two years in college was “the exact right amount of time” for him. It may be for others, too.
“I think I learned a lot, and it would have been like vastly diminishing returns,” Altman recently told investor Cory Levy during a surprise appearance at Internapalooza, Levy’s networking summit for tech interns.
Altman said the four-year college experience may not be necessary in today’s world.
“I’ve sort of thought that maybe the way the world has evolved, college just shouldn’t be as long as it is, but it was still great to meet people and kind of like live on your own and get to work on projects,” he said.
In 2005, the future OpenAI chief dropped out of Stanford after two years to cofound Loopt, an app that allowed users to share their location with friends. Loopt went on to be part of the first Y Combinator batch, which paved the way for Altman’s eventual rise to running the famed startup incubator himself.
Altman said two more years of college “would have not been that great.”
“So, I was very happy with how it went, but you don’t get to run the experiment twice,” he said. “I know a lot of people now who have not gone to college at all and done great.”
Altman’s views align with those of others in tech, most notably his mentor and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who supports a fellowship that awards $250,000 to young people to skip college entirely or at least take a break from their studies.
Altman’s career advice
The OpenAI chief had additional advice for those in the audience, including why it’s often a waste for young entrepreneurs to try to be taken seriously.
“I think people put too much effort into trying to get taken seriously, and you can sort of get a long way in life and career just by doing stuff,” Altman said. “And I think this is much more true now than ever before. You can make a whole startup kind of by yourself in a room with a lot of AI tokens, but not much else.”
Altman said that in some cases, you may just need to add someone to your team.
“If you were trying to do enterprise sales to a big, stodgy, old company, then it kind of does,” he said. “And after trying and failing to get taken seriously in that specific way for a while, I was like, ‘I’m just going to hire a 50-year-old.'”
Asked about the time when he juggled OpenAI and his other duties, Altman said it’s bad advice to tell people starting out to focus on just a single project.
“I think it’s fine to work on multiple projects for a little while because you don’t really know what’s going to work,” he said. “You don’t really know what you’re going to be interested in. You don’t really know what’s going to be a good fit. But then the mistake that people do make is as soon as you figure out what your highest conviction thing is, that is when you’re supposed to do the painful work of getting free from the other stuff and going all in.”
