As the CEO of OpenAI, a leader in developing artificial intelligence (AI) tools, Sam Altman is no stranger to taking risks. In 2005, he made a career-defining decision by dropping out of Stanford to create Loopt, a location-based social networking app. This move ultimately led him to co-found OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT.

“It seemed like a really fun thing to try,” the 39-year-old explained during an interview with students at his alma mater, John Burroughs School in the St. Louis area, as reported by CNBC Make It. Altman noted that he was willing to take the risk because he could always return to his studies if entrepreneurship didn’t pan out.

“That’s the key to most risk, is most things are not a one-way door,” Altman said. “You can try something, it doesn’t work out, you can undo it, you can do something else.” It’s important to take the right risks but that doesn’t mean that one should avoid taking them altogether, he added. “The risky thing is not to go try the things that might really work out” because regret can kick in, the OpenAI boss said. “You kind of look back at your career 10, 20, 30 years later and say, ‘Man, I wish I had tried the thing I really wanted to try. You should just put a huge premium on doing that anytime you feel like you might say that later.”

Mr Altman also encouraged students and young professionals to be open to deviating from a traditional path of going to college, getting a job and staying there “forever.” He said that that might have been a guarantee of financial security for some people in previous generations. 

“Now I think the traditional path is, I won’t say falling apart, but it’s quite challenged,” he said. “And AI will probably disrupt things even more and put more variants in the traditional path.”