AI cuts three months of work to 17 minutes: Altman

Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Sep 2 (SocialNews.XYZ) Artificial intelligence (AI) can now complete in minutes the work that start-ups were once expected to perform over three months, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman has said, predicting an unprecedented surge in entrepreneurship and small-business creation.

"The work that we expected a startup to accomplish in three months is now probably doable in, like, 17 minutes with Codex," Altman added during a fireside chat with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

"This is just amazing. The world is not caught up with what this is going to mean," he said.

Before establishing OpenAI, Altman ran a start-up accelerator.

That experience, he said, convinced him that entrepreneurship was among the most important forces within capitalism and that many of the technology industry's significant ideas emerged from start-ups rather than large companies.

He added that AI had dramatically reduced the time and resources needed to turn an idea into a product, test it and collect feedback from customers.

"I think this, for example, will be the greatest boom in entrepreneurship and the creation and development of small businesses the world's ever seen," Altman said.

"People with promising ideas had often been held back because they could not raise enough capital, hire experts, develop new science or manage complicated supply chains," he added.

AI could now help them overcome many of those barriers.

"If you had a great idea, but you didn't have the resources or the ability to get enough capital together or hire experts to work on it or to figure out what it's gonna take to invent new science or manage a complex supply chain, you can do that with AI," Altman said.

He cited the example of a laundromat operator whose business was struggling.

The owner used ChatGPT to prepare marketing material, seek advice on legal contracts and manage relationships with vendors.

"He was really the first person I met that had figured out how to use AI to effectively run a business," Altman said.

"The example stood out because it came soon after ChatGPT was released, when the technology was considerably less capable than current systems," he added.

AI use among businesses has since accelerated, particularly with the emergence of coding agents and tools for office-based work.

"In 2025, we saw a real acceleration of this with coding agents and white collar work agents," Altman said.

He predicted that another change would arrive with long-term AI agents that could function as persistent virtual colleagues, working continuously alongside individuals and businesses.

Altman added that AI would transform large companies and governments, but its ability to empower entrepreneurs was particularly significant.

"It could enable more people to build independent businesses instead of becoming small parts of large corporations."

"What AI can do for entrepreneurs and for people that want to take an idea and bring it into the world quickly, is really quite amazing," he said.

Altman also told G20 representatives that countries could take different approaches to regulating AI and decide whether to construct their own data centres or rent computing capacity elsewhere. But every economy would need to use the technology to remain competitive and help its businesses grow.

OpenAI began work in January 2016 after being announced in late 2015.

Altman had previously served as president of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley start-up accelerator that supports young companies through funding, advice and an intensive development programme.

Source: IANS