OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says remote work isn’t a good fit for startups. JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is not averse to change — after all, he helped kickstart the current AI race with chatbot ChatGPT and threatened to turn several industries upside down — but he still believes startups are the most effective are when employees work together in an office.
The idea of fully remote working becoming the norm has come and gone, he said this week at a fireside chat in San Francisco organized by fintech firm Stripe.
“I think definitely one of the worst mistakes the tech industry has made in a long time was that everyone could work completely remotely forever and startups didn’t have to be together,” he told attendees.
“There would be no loss of creativity. I would say the experiment is over and the technology isn’t good enough for people to be completely remote forever, especially in startups.”
He is not alone in his assessment. Many CEOs have called for remote workers to spend more time in the office, including Bob Iger at Disney, Howard Schultz at Starbucks, and Robert Thomson at News Corp. During the pandemic, remote work or a hybrid work schedule was the only option for many office workers — and many preferred to be in the office every workday.
“I don’t believe in remote work for startups,” Keith Rabois, general partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, told The Logan Bartlett Show last week, adding that neither he nor his firm would invest in a company based on it. Younger workers, he noted, “learn by osmosis” in ways that require face-to-face interaction, and supervisors discover hidden talent by observing them.
At ailing Uber competitor Lyft, new CEO David Risher ordered remote workers back into the office last week after laying off more than 1,000 employees, or about 26% of the workforce. Staff are now required to come on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with Tuesdays being recommended.
Many teleworkers claim that working from home is fine, and they’re not eager to return to pre-pandemic office and commuting routines. In a Pew Research survey released last month, 56% of respondents said working from home helps them get work done and meet deadlines, while 37% said it neither helps nor hurts.
But at least one CEO, James Clarke of digital marketing firm Clearlink, fears employees may be secretly holding multiple jobs while working remotely. He also worries that by using AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4, some could save time — time his company isn’t using.
Altman said he would discourage startups from working remotely because it can create confusion. He noted that “the more unclear and earlier the product, the more face-to-face time the team needs to work together.”
He knows a thing or two about it. As he and colleague Greg Brockman, the co-founder of OpenAI, told the Potential podcast this week, they spent months figuring out exactly what their AI chatbots should be and ultimately decided against specializing in a subject such as law or medicine and instead opted for the widest possible audience – and to let that audience decide for themselves how to use the technology.
This strategy has proven so successful that OpenAI is now valued at nearly $30 billion despite only being founded seven years ago. And CEOs around the world want to take advantage of the productivity gains made possible by tools like ChatGPT and GPT-4.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said this week his company will stop hiring jobs it believes could be replaced by artificial intelligence in the coming years. He also said while you might be just as productive from home, “your career suffers” when you work remotely.