Meta's 28-Year-Old AI Chief Has This Advice For Teens Looking To Cultivate Skills

Alexandr Wang, an MIT dropout, who is now Meta's chief AI officer, encouraged teenagers to learn to use AI code creation tools during an episode of the TBPN podcast that aired earlier this month.

As AI takes over coding at tech giants, Wang advised teenagers to get up to speed with vibe-coding. In fact, he insisted that they spend "all of their time", practicing it. Vibe-coding refers to allowing AI to write code based on instructions in plain English.

"If you are, like, 13 years old, you should spend all of your time vibe-coding," Wang said on the podcast. "That’s how you should live your life", he said.

He also said that if young adolescents will be at a huge advantage if they spend "10,000" hours familiarising themselves with AI.

Wang's statement come in the backdrop of AI writing up to 30% of the code for giants like Microsoft and Google. Moreover, AI coding tools like Replit and Cursor, which can generate blocks of code from a prompt, have enabled the rise of vibe-coding.

"It’s impossible to understate the degree to which I’ve been radicalised by AI coding," Wang said. "I think that fundamentally, the role of an engineer is very different now than it was before."

He also predicted that within the subsequent five years, AI will be able to generate a substantial amount of code, which includes, "literally all the code" that he has ever written.

In 2016, the now chief AI officer at Meta had co-founded a data labelling startup for AI training called Scale AI, and spearheaded the operations in the company as CEO for close to a decade.

As a result of Scale AI's growth, Wang became the world's youngest self made billionaire with a net worth of $2 billion, according to Forbes. In June, he announced that he would be joining Meta and leaving his start-up.

Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, acquiring 49% stake in the startup and getting access to new talent, including Wang. This investment boosted Scale AI's valuation to $29 billion from $14 billion.