The best time to get into computer science is right now, said OpenAI’s CEO.
“What a cool, high-leverage time,” Altman said in an interview with Stanford professor Dan Boneh published on Wednesday. “Obviously, I would focus on AI.”
Altman said AI isn’t just the hottest field right now — it’s the defining technology of this generation.
“It might be the most important thing of a much longer period of time,” he added.
The OpenAI CEO has been vocal about his belief that AI will transform nearly every part of work and society. Altman said in an episode of the “Conversations with Tyler” podcast published last Wednesday that he would be ashamed if OpenAI were not the first major company run by an “AI CEO.”
Artificial general intelligence — or AGI, when machines can reason like humans — has been the company’s north star since its research lab days. In a livestream in October, Altman said OpenAI’s goal “is by March of 2028 to have a true automated AI researcher.”
Altman also shared what he called his “best, accidental” piece of career advice during the interview with Boneh.
“It’s always served me well to just find the smartest cluster of people I could,” Altman said, adding that he would “hang around them a lot.”
“Work on interesting problems, hang around smart people, try to run a tight feedback loop to get better and better at whatever you’re doing.”
Computer science education should change
Altman said in the interview that the way schools teach computer science “should probably change quite a lot” as AI reshapes how software gets written.
“I felt like we were being taught 10 years behind the frontier of what would have been most useful to me to learn,” he said, recalling his time at Stanford.
Altman enrolled at Stanford in 2003 to study computer science but dropped out after two years to cofound Loopt, a location-sharing social media app. After Loopt was acquired, he went on to lead Y Combinator as its president before cofounding OpenAI.
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“If I think about the day job of someone who’s going to really contribute to creating very valuable software in the future, I bet it looks very different from the way we would teach that class,” he added.
The OpenAI CEO said that changing college curriculum to match the new reality of AI agents “is going to take some thinking.”
Like Altman, other tech leaders have warned that universities are not keeping pace with the rapid change in AI.
Stanford professor and founder of Google Brain Andrew Ng said in a talk at Snowflake’s “Build” conference on Monday that computer science majors are seeing higher unemployment rates because “universities haven’t adapted the curricula fast enough for AI coding.”
“Even I can’t hire enough people that really know AI,” he added.
Still, many in the industry say a computer science education remains foundational.
OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor said a computer science degree remains valuable for learning “systems thinking,” even if AI tools are changing how people code.
“Studying computer science is a different answer than learning to code, but I would say I still think it’s extremely valuable to study computer science,” Taylor said in an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published in August.
“Computer science is a wonderful major to learn systems thinking,” he added.