Axios interview: Altman sees revenge of "idea guy" (axios.com)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says this era is bringing the revenge of the "idea guy" — the once-annoying aspiring entrepreneur burbling about their brainstorm with no technical chops to pull it off. Altman says it would be like saying: "I have a great idea for a song. I just need that guy with the guitar to make it for me." "It really did strike me as ridiculous," Altman told me in Chapel Hill, N.C. "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." Why it matters: Polls show most Americans think the risks of AI outweigh the benefits , with data-center rage as a bipartisan bonfire in the midterms. Altman — who's trying to sell AI into a massive backlash — wants to remind Americans that amid all the real risks , AI can equal opportunity. "This is gonna be the best time in the world to do a startup," Altman said recently . Reality check: These new tools are great for idea people. But most people are doers, not dreamers, and don't feel they have the time or AI skills to spin up a startup in their spare time. Our experience is that AI is a real unlock for a very small percentage of people who are idea generators or problem solvers, and in a position to put that into action. By the numbers: An American startup boom ignited during COVID and continued through this summer . Filings of new-business applications have continued to set records in the chatbot era. The number of new U.S. businesses formed in the first half of this year, over 3 million, is the most for a January-June stretch in Census Bureau data going back to 2005. The backstory: I first heard Altman's "idea guy" riff last spring , when he was talking onstage with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, who asked how traits of successful founders were changing in this era. "We would make fun of these [idea] people," Altman said. "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." "For a long time, the most important ingredient ... in a founding team was technical talent, and that's still very important. But now people who just really deeply understand their users and can't code at all, I want to fund those people. And that's a big turnaround." That stuck in my mind. So when I sat down with Altman, 41, last week at the Carolina Inn in a bilateral meeting room during the G20 Innovation Ministerial, I asked him how that notion could be useful for today's AI users, or for people who should be wielding AI but are skeptics. With GPT-6 Astra , OpenAI's powerful new model, Altman said, "you can start and run a small business effectively. ... It's like anyone who wants to have a company now has genius-level employees in every area of expertise." Zoom in: AI makes many ideas monetizable that never would have penciled out in the past. "I met this guy recently who had used [GPT-]5.6 to make a