OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s his No. 1 strategy for living without regrets [Video]

He may not have known it at the time, but in 2005 Sam Altman took a risk that changed the trajectory of his career.

That’s when Altman dropped out of Stanford to build Loopt, a location-based social networking app — the first of his projects before co-founding OpenAI, the game-changing artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT.

It “seemed like a really fun thing to try,” Altman, 39, told students during an interview at his alma mater, the St. Louis-area John Burroughs School. More importantly, he added, leaving college was a decision he could go back on if entrepreneurship didn’t work out.

“That’s the key to most risk, is most things are not a one-way door,” he said. “You can try something, it doesn’t work out, you can undo it, you can do something else.”