Sam Altman said he rejected a Goldman Sachs internship during college, arguing that startup building offered more room to create than a hierarchical banking career. Speaking at the Internapalooza Conference last month, Altman said he had been “peer pressured and tricked” into applying because it was seen as the prestigious path, but chose instead to work on Loopt, later joining Y Combinator’s first batch, becoming YC’s president and eventually founding OpenAI. His comments come as OpenAI, which recently completed a $7 billion share sale and is said to be targeting a potential trillion-dollar IPO as soon as the second half of 2026, increasingly draws talent from Wall Street. The company has recruited more than 100 former bankers from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley to help train AI models for financial modeling and other work often done by junior bankers, and reportedly plans to expand its workforce to 8,000 by year-end. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said in June that finance hires now need to know tools such as Codex, underscoring how AI is becoming central to hiring and operations in finance. The shift is also spreading across the sector, with Anthropic rolling out pre-built AI agents (task-specific AI software) for financial workflows already in production at JPMorgan, Goldman and Citi.