OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reveals he's jealous of 20-year-old college dropouts due to...

According to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and a prominent figure in Silicon Valley, he is envious of today's 20-year-old college dropouts since they have access to unprecedented opportunities to create game-changing businesses.
 
“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, Business Insider reported. “The amount of stuff you can build, the opportunity in this space is so incredibly wide.”

After two years of studying computer science at Stanford, Altman left the school in 2005. He co-founded the location-sharing software Loopt before becoming the head of OpenAI. He acknowledged that he hasn't had "a real chunk of free mental space in a couple of years to think hard about what I would build" while thinking back on his own path, but he also said, "I know there would be a lot of cool stuff to build."

Rising educational expenses and the emergence of AI-powered tools that make product development simpler than ever are the two main causes of this surge in early entrepreneurship. According to Business Insider, AI coding platforms like Replit and Cursor enable anyone to create apps without extensive technical knowledge, while some US degrees now cost more than half a million dollars.

Venture capital firms agree. In his recent article, Andreessen Horowitz referred to this as "the best time in a decade for dropouts and recent graduates to start a company," stating that "the playing field has leveled for younger founders." The sentiment was echoed by Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman, who pointed out that 30 percent of YC's most recent class were college students or recent graduates, up from 10 percent two years prior.

Startups rarely see their long-term advantage at the outset, according to Altman. "I would have said, 'I have no idea,' if you had asked me when we started ChatGPT what our long-term advantages were going to be," he added. He said that further features like ChatGPT's memory appeared.