Students use ChatGPT as a personal OS, Altman says

At Sequoia Capital’s AI Ascent event in San Francisco, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described college students using ChatGPT like a personal operating system. He said students connect the chatbot to lecture notes, PDFs, cloud storage, calendars, coding tools and reusable prompts to support daily tasks.

Altman told the audience, “They really do use it like an operating system.” He said many students memorize or store detailed prompts and paste them into conversations to run repeatable workflows.

OpenAI data released this year shows more than 30% of Americans aged 18 to 24 use ChatGPT. A separate survey found 26% of U.S. teenagers ages 13 to 17 used ChatGPT for schoolwork in 2024, up from 13% in 2023.

Students apply the tool to writing, studying, research summaries, scheduling and software development. Some build reusable prompt templates to speed common tasks and to integrate the model with other apps.

Altman described younger users treating the chatbot as a memory of past conversations that can influence choices. “They don’t really make life decisions without asking ChatGPT what they should do,” he said. “It has the full context on every person in their life and what they’ve talked about.”

Altman said OpenAI uses the technology internally for coding and that ChatGPT “writes a lot of our code,” without giving a percentage. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said AI generated more than 25% of new code at Google.

Researchers and educators have warned that guidance from large language models should be checked by experts. Studies note the systems can sound persuasive even when their advice is incorrect because they lack real empathy, judgment and moral reasoning. Other researchers describe lower-risk uses such as organization, brainstorming and routine decisions.

Universities are updating policies in response to growing student use. Many now allow limited AI-assisted brainstorming or editing if students disclose tool use; some institutions have tightened rules to address plagiarism and reliance on automated systems.

Altman compared the pattern to the early smartphone era, saying younger users adopt new interfaces faster while older users take longer to adjust.