Sam Altman thinks that four years is too much to be in college

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman feels that the traditional four-year college track may no longer be necessary. According to a report by Business Insider, speaking at Internapalooza, Altman said two years at Stanford was “the exact right amount of time” for him before dropping out in 2005 to cofound Loopt, a location‑sharing app that became part of Y Combinator’s first batch. “I think I learned a lot, and it would have been like vastly diminishing returns,” he explained, adding that two more years “would have not been that great.”Altman suggested that the way the world has evolved makes four years of college excessive for some. “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. He noted that many people today succeed without attending college at all, echoing views shared by his mentor Peter Thiel, who funds fellowships encouraging young people to skip or pause their studies.Career advice for young entrepreneursAltman also offered guidance to interns and aspiring founders. He cautioned against spending too much energy trying to be taken seriously. “You can sort of get a long way in life and career just by doing stuff,” he said, pointing out that AI tools now make it possible to build startups with minimal resources. For enterprise sales, however, he admitted hiring experienced professionals was sometimes necessary.Balancing multiple projectsAsked about the period when he was juggling OpenAI alongside other responsibilities, Altman pushed back on the common advice to focus on a single project from the start. He said it's reasonable to work on multiple things for a while, since it's often genuinely unclear early on what will succeed, what will hold someone's interest, or what will turn out to be the right fit. The real mistake, he said, comes later: once someone identifies the project they have the highest conviction in, that's the point at which they need to do the harder work of cutting loose from everything else and committing fully to it.