Speaking at a fireside chat in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said artificial intelligence can now complete work that once took a startup months, claiming “the work that we expected a startup to accomplish in three months is now probably doable in, like, 17 minutes with Codex.” Altman, a former president of startup accelerator Y Combinator, predicted AI will fuel “the greatest boom in entrepreneurship and the creation and development of small businesses the world’s ever seen,” saying it sharply reduces the time and resources needed to turn an idea into a product, test it and gather customer feedback. He said AI helps entrepreneurs overcome barriers such as limited access to capital, difficulty hiring specialized talent and the complexity of developing technology or managing supply chains. He recalled a laundromat operator who used ChatGPT to create marketing materials, seek guidance on legal contracts and manage vendor relationships. Altman said business adoption accelerated in 2025 with coding agents and white collar work agents, and predicted a shift as long-running AI agents become persistent virtual colleagues. He also told G20 representatives that countries could take different approaches to AI regulation and decide whether to build their own data centers or obtain computing capacity elsewhere.