Sam Altman: Two years of college is enough, skip the rest

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told a room of tech interns that two years of college was the right amount for him. He said the returns after that drop fast.

"I think I learned a lot, and it would have been like vastly diminishing returns," Altman said during a surprise appearance at Internapalooza, a networking summit hosted by investor Cory Levy. "I've sort of thought that maybe the way the world has evolved, college just shouldn't be as long as it is."

Altman dropped out of Stanford after two years in 2005 to cofound Loopt, a location-sharing app. Loopt became part of the first Y Combinator batch. That experience led to his role running the accelerator and later OpenAI.

"Two more years would have not been that great," he said. "So, I was very happy with how it went, you don't get to run the experiment twice. I know a lot of people now who have not gone to college at all and done great."

The remarks echo the view of Altman's mentor Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder who funds a fellowship that pays young people $250,000 to skip or pause college. Thiel's program has backed companies including Palantir and Stripe.

Altman also offered advice on credibility. "I think people put too much effort into trying to get taken seriously, and you can sort of get a long way in life and career just by doing stuff," he said. "You can make a whole startup kind of by yourself in a room with a lot of AI tokens, not much else."

He acknowledged that enterprise sales require a different approach. "If you were trying to do enterprise sales to a big, stodgy, old company, then it kind of does," he said. "After trying and failing to get taken seriously in that specific way for a while, I was like, 'I'm just going to hire a 50-year-old.'"

Asked about the advice to focus on a single project, Altman said it is fine to work on multiple things early. "You don't really know what's going to work," he said. "You don't really know what you're going to be interested in. You don't really know what's going to be a good fit. The mistake that people do make is as soon as you figure out what your highest conviction thing is, that is when you're supposed to do the painful work of getting free from the other stuff and going all in."

Altman's comments come as the tech industry debates the role of formal education in hiring. Major companies including Apple, Google, and IBM have dropped degree requirements for some roles. The cost of a four-year degree has risen sharply, with average tuition and fees at private universities topping $40,000 a year, according to the College Board.