[DigitalToday reporter Jinju Hong] OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (샘 알트먼) said young people entering society should take on new challenges rather than follow existing paths, as AI adoption rapidly changes how work is structured.

TechRadar, an IT outlet, reported on Oct. 29 that Altman said in a recent talk at Stanford Graduate School of Business that the current labour market should be seen as a period of opportunity rather than uncertainty.

Altman particularly pointed to a tendency among MBA students to chase past success formulas. "The reason I'm always disappointed in MBA students is that they try to do what looked cool five years ago," he said. "Right now is a very good time to do something new," he said.

He said AI-driven change that is shaking up how companies work is still in its early stages. He believes many tasks handled by people today could be done in the future by AI more cheaply, quickly and efficiently. "A lot of the work people do today will be done better, cheaper and faster by AI," Altman said, adding that the way work is carried out will also change significantly.

Amid the shift, Altman said opportunities could open up for new hires. "If you're going out into the world trying to do something now, it's better to start your career at a moment of the biggest change, when competitive conditions are most open," he said. "People with potential, drive, ideas, a new perspective and new skills do relatively well when the ground is shifting," he added.

Altman's remarks come as concerns grow that AI will replace jobs. Still, he has drawn a line against claims that wider AI adoption will immediately lead to a large-scale collapse in employment. He previously rebutted in May 2026 the claim that the spread of AI would lead to the "end of jobs". In July 2026, he also said that separate from expectations that AI will boost productivity and efficiency, changes in society and in how people work may not show up quickly right away.

Altman also pointed to his own career as an example of adapting to change. He dropped out of college at 19, then started the location-based social networking app Loopt in 2005, and co-founded OpenAI with Elon Musk in 2015. He also said even bigger companies could emerge on top of the technology OpenAI has released. "Among the companies that will be built on top of the technology OpenAI has put out into the world, many could become bigger and more important than OpenAI," Altman said.

The comments show there is room for growth not only for companies that build AI tools directly but also for those that design new services using the technology. As a result, early-career strategies in the AI era are increasingly likely to shift away from joining large companies or taking standardised roles and toward solving new problems in a rapidly changing market.