Students need to get good at using new AI tools: Sam Altman

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman urged students to learn how new artificial intelligence (AI) tools work to grow in a competitive world. He was speaking on Zerodha cofounder Nikhil Kamath's podcast, where he explained what GPT-5 was and how it could be used by students, researchers and professionals.

"The most important specific thing to study is just getting really good at using the new AI tools. Learning is valuable for its own sake and learning to learn is this meta skill that will serve you throughout life. Whether you're learning engineering or any other field, fluency with the tools is really important," he said.

Altman pointed out that the difference between people who are truly AI-native and think of everything in terms of AI tools and those who are not is significant.


"There are other general skills that are important, such as learning to be adaptable and resilient, qualities that I believe are highly learnable and especially valuable in a rapidly changing world," he added.

Altman said GPT-5 is like an expert that you can not only ask anything but also get to do anything. "So, if you need a piece of software created, it can do it from scratch. If you need a research report on some complicated topic or if you needed to plan an event for you, it could do that, too." He also said India is the second-biggest market for OpenAI and may become the largest.

OpenAI launched GPT-5, which it claims is the smartest and most capable version of its AI models to date, on August 8. The company said the new model is more accurate, more efficient, and has significantly lower hallucination rates than previous versions.