Sam Altman glad he turned down Goldman Sachs job

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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said he is glad he rejected an internship at Goldman Sachs during college. Speaking at the Internapalooza Conference in July, Altman recalled that working at Goldman Sachs was considered a top career path in his sophomore year. He applied and got in but later decided not to join. Instead, he worked on his startup Loopt and joined Y Combinator's first batch, eventually becoming its president and co-founding OpenAI.

Altman said he now views working at Goldman Sachs as “unbelievably terrible” because corporate careers are hierarchical and stifle creativity. He added that artificial intelligence has made it much easier for students today to turn down such offers. “You can make a whole startup, kind of by yourself in a room with a lot of AI tokens,” he said, advising young people to make progress by building products rather than climbing the corporate ladder.