OpenAI's Sam Altman: This Is the Most Valuable Skill in the Age of AI

Some talk about super intelligence, AI personal assistants for all, and a world free of want. Others warn of the robot apocalypse. A few even argue that the potential of current AI models is overblown. But what just about everyone can agree on is that sometime quite soon, AI will fundamentally change how we live and work.

How should we entrepreneurs best prepare ourselves (and our kids)? That’s another question experts haven’t been shy about taking a stab at. Many suggest we hone the fundamentally human skills that machines still struggle to replicate – things like adaptability, empathy, and interacting with the physical world. 

But when asked for his opinion on a recent episode of Adam Grant’s Re:Thinking podcast, Sam Altman – CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT – mentioned a different skill as the most important one to cultivate if you want to thrive in an AI-filled world. 

“Eventually, I think the whole economy transforms,” he predicts. But don’t worry too much that a robot will steal everyone’s jobs. “We always find new jobs, even though every time we stare at a new technology, we assume they’re all gonna go away,” he continues. 

How to best prepare for this economic transformation is a conversation he has a personal stake in. Altman’s professional and financial future is clearly assured. But he and his husband are expecting a child soon. What skills does he think his future child needs to focus on to thrive in this AI-filled future? 

“There will be a kind of ability we still really value, but it will not be raw, intellectual horsepower to the same degree,” Altman believes. So if sheer IQ isn’t the key to future success, what is? “Figuring out what questions to ask will be more important than figuring out the answer,” he says. 

And he doesn’t just mean asking AI better questions. “The prompting tricks that a lot of people were using in 2023 are no longer relevant, and some of them are never gonna be necessary again,” Altman claims later in the episode. 

So what does Altman mean exactly when he says asking questions will be more important than answering them once AI becomes smarter than humans? The answer isn’t 100 percent clear, though Grant takes a stab at summarizing what Altman might be trying to say: 

“We used to put a premium on how much knowledge you had collected in your brain, and if you were a fact collector, that made you smart and respected. And now I think it’s much more valuable to be a connector of dots than a collector of facts that if you can synthesize and recognize patterns, you have an edge.” 

Back when Altman was in school, the OpenAI CEO responds, teachers tried to ban what they then called “the Google.” The thinking was, if you could just look up facts, then why bother memorizing them? Wouldn’t we all end up intellectually poorer in the long run? 

Now, looking around at the current moment in global affairs, I think it’s fair to ask whether those ‘90s teachers might have had a point about the internet’s potential effect on our collective intellect. I personally am not sure that facts are in greater rather than lesser supply today than back when I first encountered “the Google.” 

Nor am I sure that the tenor of the discussion or the problems we’re solving (or usually not solving) today are on some higher plane of human achievement. A few minutes on Twitter/X can really make you wonder. Though to be fair to Altman, AI is already powering incredible scientific, if not social, breakthroughs. 

But putting these objections aside for a moment, Altman is surely right that humans will never beat machines at recalling facts. What research (like this fun study that pitted AI against 4-year-olds) suggests we still excel at is looking at those facts in an unconventional light or pairing them with other unexpected facts, aka asking questions or connecting dots.

Which suggests that if Sam Altman wants his future child to thrive in a world of AI — or if any entrepreneur out there is hoping to prepare themselves or their offspring for the world of the future — focusing on exercising your creativite muscles is probably one smart way to go.