Sam Altman Says Three Months of Start-Up Work Now Takes 17 Minutes

Set Trending Topics as a preferred source on Google.

If you want to start a company, the one thing you no longer need, according to Sam Altman, is time. “The work that we expected a startup to accomplish in three months is now probably doable in, like, 17 minutes with Codex,” OpenAI’s chief executive said during an onstage conversation with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in Chapel Hill, N.C., the news agency IANS reported. The world, he added, has not yet grasped what that means.

The Biggest Start-Up Boom Ever

Mr. Altman, who once led the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, expects the biggest boom in new businesses the world has ever seen. A.I. is drastically lowering the barriers for founders, he argued: Turning an idea into a product and testing it with customers used to require capital, specialized staff and technical know-how, and much of that can now be done with A.I. Since 2025, he said, coding agents and A.I. tools for office work have sharply accelerated the trend.

As an early example, he cited a laundromat owner who, shortly after ChatGPT launched, used A.I. to handle marketing materials, contract questions and suppliers. “He was really the first person I met that had figured out how to use AI to effectively run a business,” Mr. Altman said. In the future, long-running A.I. agents are expected to work as permanent virtual colleagues for individuals and companies. Speaking to representatives of G20 countries, Mr. Altman also said that countries could take different paths on regulation and data centers, but that every economy would need to adopt A.I. to stay competitive.

Mr. Altman made a similar case at Y Combinator’s Startup School over the summer. There, he rejected the pessimistic view that “a Codex prompt is a whole startup,” and that founding a company has therefore become pointless. Founders, he argued, should use the time they save to pursue far more ambitious projects.

Codex Versus Claude Code and Cursor

Mr. Altman is not exactly a neutral observer. Codex is OpenAI’s own coding agent and competes directly with Anthropic’s Claude Code, with Cursor, which Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI is in the process of acquiring, and with app builders such as Lovable and Replit. OpenAI and Anthropic are currently locked in a price war for business customers, in which coding agents play a central role.

Code Is Not a Company

Writing software faster does not mean start-ups will succeed faster. Finding customers, building sales, securing funding and meeting regulatory requirements cannot be delegated to a coding agent. A widely cited 2025 study by the research organization METR even found that experienced developers using A.I. tools were 19 percent slower on average when working in codebases they knew well, even though they believed they were faster. And earlier this year, Mr. Altman himself admitted that while building an app of his own, Codex surprised him with better ideas for new features. He said it made him feel “a little useless.”