Sam Altman knows how to play the startup game. Beyond founding two of his own companies—social network Loopt, which he created at just 20 years old, and OpenAI, which now stands as one of the highest valued unicorns of all time—he’s helped launch dozens of other startups as the former president of Y Combinator.

That background has led Altman to his view of the current startup landscape: “chronic disappointment.”

In an interview for Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Altman sounded off on how he feels prospective founders are falling behind in the era of artificial intelligence.

“My chronic disappointment with MBA students is that they always want to go do the thing that was cool five years ago rather than try something new,” Altman said. “I think this is a great time to go do the new thing.”

What would succumbing to the cool factor look like? Altman says now would be a bad time to “start another copy of OpenAI,” but that “there are many companies that can be built on top of technology that OpenAI has put out into the world that will be much, I hope, bigger and more important than OpenAI.”

Though Altman has admitted that AI could lead to the apocalypse, he’s quick to shut down a different kind of doomsday: that AI will decimate the job market. 

“I don’t think there’s going to be like a job apocalypse in the way that many people talk about,” Altman said. As with finding success starting a new tech company, he simply encourages job seekers to adapt, rather than staying stuck in the past.

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