OpenAI’s chief economist Ronnie Chatterji, also a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, said on the “Summation” podcast released on Tuesday that copying successful people’s careers is “relatively bad advice.” Chatterji argued that a successful person’s public CV often omits periods of struggle, uncertainty, and failure, and that their choices were “very context dependent” on a specific economic moment. He noted that the economic environment determines when the best time to found a company is, citing examples such as Mark Zuckerberg building Facebook as internet access grew, Jeff Bezos founding Amazon as e-commerce took off, and Sam Altman leading OpenAI through the generative AI boom. As AI forces workers to reconsider valuable jobs and skills, Chatterji said coding, maths, formal reasoning, and an understanding of how AI works will remain important, while judgment, flexibility, resilience, and the ability to identify worthwhile problems will become more valuable as AI takes on more tasks.