Chapel Hill, September 3, 2026 (Yes Punjab News)
Artificial intelligence (AI) could dramatically accelerate entrepreneurship by enabling start-ups to complete work that once took months in a matter of minutes, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said.
“The work that we expected a startup to accomplish in three months is now probably doable in, like, 17 minutes with Codex,” Altman said during a fireside chat with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Calling the development “amazing”, Altman said the world had yet to fully understand its implications and predicted an unprecedented boom in entrepreneurship and small-business creation.
Drawing on his earlier experience running start-up accelerator Y Combinator, Altman said entrepreneurship was one of the most important forces in capitalism, with many major technology ideas emerging from start-ups rather than large corporations.
He said AI was lowering the time, capital and expertise required to turn an idea into a product, test it and obtain customer feedback. Entrepreneurs who previously struggled to raise funds, hire specialists, develop new technology or manage complex supply chains could increasingly use AI to overcome those barriers.
Altman cited the example of a struggling laundromat owner who used ChatGPT to create marketing material, seek guidance on legal contracts and manage vendor relationships. He described the entrepreneur as an early example of someone using AI to effectively run a business, noting that the technology was considerably less capable when the example emerged shortly after ChatGPT’s launch.
Altman said business adoption accelerated in 2025 with coding agents and AI tools for white-collar work. He also predicted the emergence of long-term AI agents capable of functioning as persistent virtual colleagues alongside people and businesses.
While AI will reshape large companies and governments, Altman said its ability to empower individuals to build independent businesses could be particularly transformative.
He also said economies may choose different approaches to AI regulation and computing infrastructure, including building their own data centres or renting computing capacity, but argued that every economy would need to adopt AI to remain competitive.
OpenAI was announced in late 2015 and began work in January 2016. Altman previously served as president of Y Combinator.
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