OpenAI head Sam Altman touts ‘revenge of the idea guy’ — here’s how he thinks people can still get ahead with no tech skills in an AI world

“We would make fun of these [idea] people,” Altman said at the time. “They weren’t that successful. And it was kind of always personally annoying to me. All of a sudden it’s like the revenge of the idea guys.”

An iteration acceleration

AI, Altman told Axios, will let potential founders transform their visions, which others may have thought were flights of fancy, into reality. And he admitted to getting a little schadenfreude-driven satisfaction from that.

“It really did strike me as ridiculous,” Altman said. “But now we’re watching a whole generation of people iterate on ideas faster than they ever could. The economics have been reset for what it means to make a new small business or large business.”

He likened the process to a would-be songwriter having an idea for a song, but lacking the ability to make the music to accompany it.

Converting skeptics

While there is still a sizable percentage of the population that doesn’t trust AI and rejects efforts made with it, Altman argues recent advances should help transform some of those doubters into evangelists.

Rapidly spinning up and marketing brand new software tools is something that wasn’t possible before the advent of AI, Altman said.

“This would have cost you millions of dollars if you had to pay for software engineers,” he said. “All of a sudden you had an idea, you had this tiny corner of this tiny industry, there’s one particular kind of task, and you were able to get software written for it. And of course people will pay for that.”

The impact isn’t limited to software creation, he said. AI, he believes, will be the best thing to happen to entrepreneurs in decades, creating a boom in startups.

“It’s like anyone who wants to have a company now has genius-level employees in every area of expertise,” Altman said.