Sam Altman Says Three Months of Start-Up Work Now Takes 17 Minutes
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
Altman says Codex can turn 3 months of startup work into 17 minutes. He thinks AI will trigger the biggest startup boom ever.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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Sam Altman thinks startup time is collapsing. In a conversation in Chapel Hill, N.C., with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the OpenAI chief said work that once took three months could now be done in about 17 minutes with Codex. His point was simple: the bottleneck is no longer the blank page, or even the first draft of the product.
He also pushed a bigger claim. Altman said AI is lowering the barriers to founding companies so much that the world is headed for the biggest boom in new businesses it has ever seen. Turning an idea into something customers can try used to demand capital, specialist hires and serious technical skill. Now, he argued, a lot of that can be handled by AI tools.
He pointed to examples from the recent past and the near future. Since 2025, he said, coding agents and office-work tools have sped things up sharply. And he described an early case of a laundromat owner who used AI after ChatGPT launched to deal with marketing materials, contract questions and suppliers. Altman said that person was the first he met who had figured out how to use AI to effectively run a business.
But faster coding is not the same thing as a successful company. Customers still need to be found, sales still need to close, funding still needs to arrive and regulations still need to be met. Even so, Altman says long-running AI agents will eventually act like permanent virtual colleagues, and he told G20 representatives that every economy will have to adopt AI to stay competitive.
He has made the same case before. At Y Combinator’s Startup School over the summer, he pushed back on the idea that a Codex prompt is already a whole startup and that founding a company is now pointless. He owns the pitch, of course — Codex is OpenAI’s coding agent — but the larger message is clear: AI is not killing startups, it is trying to compress them.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is classic AI-vendor optimism: the demo gets faster, therefore the economy must too. Coding agents may shave time off a first build, but the hard parts of a company still live in sales, regulation and plain old human mess. The real test is not whether a prompt can write code; it is whether anyone wants to buy the thing after the prompt is done.
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