OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI could replace interns — but there’s still hope for Gen Z
Entry-level jobs as we know them could soon be a thing of the past. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI can now effectively do the same work as junior-level employees, and its skillset is only expected to get even better in the coming months.
He predicted that AI will eventually rival the skills of even an experienced engineer, all while being uniquely capable of operating continuously for days on end without breaks.
“Today [AI] is like an intern that can work for a couple of hours but at some point it’ll be like an experienced software engineer that can work for a couple of days,” Altman told a panel this week alongside Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy at Snowflake Summit 2025.
Altman added that in the next year, we could see AI solving complex business problems autonomously.
“I would bet next year that in some limited cases, at least in some small ways, we start to see agents that can help us discover new knowledge, or can figure out solutions to business problems that are very non-trivial,” he said.
It’s a bold prediction we’ve heard echoed by other tech CEOs like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who warned that those who hesitate to embrace AI may find themselves at the unemployment office.
“You’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI,” he said at last month’s Milken Institute conference.
Gen Z sees AI as a companion, not a competitor
Generative AI stands poised to make entry-level jobs obsolete at a time when Generation Z is solidifying its place in the workforce, but that hasn’t stopped Gen Z from embracing the technology.
A recent Resume survey found that while one in 10 workers reported using ChatGPT regularly, Gen Z workers were twice as likely to use the tool. The same study found that the vast majority of workers at any age see ChatGPT as a helpful tool. But over half of Gen Z workers considered it the equivalent of another co-worker or assistant, compared to 40% of millennials and 35% of older generations.
Altman has broken down the generational differences in AI usage before:
“[It’s a] gross oversimplification, but like older people use ChatGPT as a Google replacement. Maybe people in their twenties and thirties use it as like a life advisor, and then, like people in college use it as an operating system,” he said at Sequoia Capital’s AI Ascent event in May.
Even as Gen Z embraces AI, some tech leaders have been sounding the alarm bells about the economic fallout of an AI-driven job market. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs, causing unemployment to skyrocket by 10% to 20%.
OpenAI owns ChatGPT, a revolutionary chatbot AI that, since its release in 2022, has quickly become one of the most advanced and widely used AI tools in the world.
Powered by OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4o, ChatGPT can help you plan your weekend, write a term paper, or any number of other tasks. It supports everything from real-time speech interaction to multimodal content creation — and you can get many of its most powerful features for free.
If you’re curious, be sure to check out our guide on how to use ChatGPT, as well as these tips to get the most out of ChatGPT.
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