Why Sam Altman doesn’t want students to rely on older generations for career advice

Careers in Indian families are seldom individual decisions. They are discussed over dinner and thought through years before the final call is taken. Collectively. And that collective decision is hinged more around stability than high flying ambition.

However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s recent remarks at the Dogra Hall of IIT Delhi questioned the traditional premise on which this long-standing logic of stability rests. His comments, in fact, exposed the fragility of the old architecture of careers anchored in predictability in a world where career paths are being shaped by constant churn, reinvention and disruption.“I think listening to old people is the biggest mistake young people make.

You will have to quickly develop your own intuitions and trust them. The traditional career advice is probably not going to work as well,” Altman told a packed hall of students.However, he clarified that parents remain central when it comes to values and life guidance. What he questioned was their ability (the ability of the older generation) to accurately predict the future of work in an AI-driven world.“For a predictor of what the world is going to be like going forward, I don't think you should trust me for having good intuition of the rate of change,” he added.

“Young people always figure this out the best.”

Why traditional career advice may not hold

For decades, career wisdom in India moved along an almost rehearsed script: Study hard. Choose a high-status degree. Enter a secure profession. Climb steadily.Fields like engineering, medicine and civil services have traditionally provided that comfort of predictability. A known ladder to climb, steady salary and a life rooted in the certainty of tomorrow. So, families choose caution over exciting and more rewarding professions out of pure rational calculation.

But in a disruptive age driven by AI, careers no longer unfold along neat, linear trajectories. They bend, break, and restart.

They mutate with the market and sometimes get rebuilt midstream, while you’re still in them.Altman’s argument leads point blankly to one core shift of the 21st century labour market: Artificial intelligence is destabilising the concept of predictability itself. If algorithms can draft legal documents, write software code, help in research, automate analytics, and shrink months of entry-level work into seconds, then the definition of ‘safe’ changes in a way that no one imagined.Altman did not shy away from this brutal reality. At IIT Delhi, he acknowledged that some job roles will vanish due to AI. So, advice rooted in yesterday’s job climate may be irrelevant for tomorrow’s not-so-predictable curve.

The not-so-safe roles of 2026

Global workforce reports suggest that a bunch of roles that felt safe till recently no longer come with the same promise of continuity. They will not vanish overnight, but the work inside them is changing.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 says employers expect routine clerical work to steadily shrink, and it lists roles such as bank tellers and data entry clerks among the fastest-declining. These are the jobs that families have treated as safe for long. A research by McKinsey adds the how: Generative AI can speed up or automate the everyday tasks that sit inside many office support and customer-facing roles such as documentation, standard queries and routine processing.

Also, the widely cited Science paper “GPTs are GPTs” underlines the same idea: Many occupations require a large share of tasks that overlap with what LLMs can do almost effortlessly now.

Bottom line

Altman’s IIT Delhi advice may come as a rude shock to Indian sentiment, but it is embedded in the hard realities of today’s careerscape. The ground beneath ‘safe’ professions is quietly shifting. Roles are being redefined from within, tasks are thinning out, and predictability is no longer guaranteed by a degree alone. So, a career advice derived from past experiences may not be in sync with a job market that refuses to sit still.