“Cool Five Years Ago” Is Still a Choice

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman criticized MBA students’ career preferences during an interview with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Futurism reports, citing Fortune. “My chronic disappointment with MBA students is that they always want to go do the thing that was cool five years ago and not do the new thing,” Altman said. The remark came as he argued that AI-driven changes could offer opportunities to people starting their careers.

The distinction matters: Altman’s quoted complaint names MBA students, not an entire generation. His broader argument concerns young people entering a changing labor market. Neither statement establishes a uniform Gen Z taste, much less a collective refusal to use AI. The narrower scene is revealing enough: a technology executive addressing future business professionals about which ambitions deserve to look current.

Altman acknowledged that AI would perform many existing tasks “better, cheaper, and faster.” He presented that disruption as a reason to pursue new opportunities. His interviewer then tested the etiquette of novelty: “So go do the new thing, even if AI is the cool thing right now,” she said, according to the report. The audience laughed. Her question exposed the awkwardness of treating newness as both an independent virtue and a recommendation for the industry already commanding the room’s attention.

There is a reasonable career argument beneath the taste judgment. A changing industry can create openings that established employers do not offer. Students may benefit from investigating those openings. But investigating a field and displaying enthusiasm for it are different activities. Calling an older ambition uncool lets a commercial proposition borrow the authority of social embarrassment.

Altman runs a company that sells AI tools. Wider adoption supports that business, although his commercial interest does not by itself invalidate his advice. It does make the standard of judgment worth inspecting. A student can compare particular jobs, skills, and business prospects. “Cool five years ago” supplies no comparable test. The career counselor has brought a velvet rope.

Nor does an established preference necessarily express nostalgia. Nostalgia involves an attachment to a remembered past; someone may want familiar work because the tasks remain interesting or the opportunity remains useful. Altman does not identify the supposedly dated pursuits in the supplied quotation. Without those particulars, age is doing work that evidence should do.

The useful question is not whether young people can prove that their ambitions belong to the present. It is whether the proposed opportunity offers worthwhile work on acceptable terms. Students owe their career decisions serious attention. They do not owe a seller’s preferred future a convincing performance of excitement.