Who is Alexandr Wang? Billionaire AI chief at Meta urges teens to spend all their time on this activity

Alexandr Wang, a 28-year-old AI billionaire, believes that the best way for teenagers to get ahead is to master AI coding tools. Meta’s AI chief Alexandr Wang urged teens to master vibe-coding.(REUTERS) (Also read: Meta employees were ‘betrayed, horrified’ Mark Zuckerberg’s MAGA makeover: Report) Speaking on an episode of the TBPN podcast earlier this month, Wang said young people should immerse themselves fully in what he calls “vibe-coding.” “If you are, like, 13 years old, you should spend all of your time vibe-coding,” Wang said. “That’s how you should live your life.” He went on to suggest that if teenagers dedicate “10,000 hours” to practising with AI tools, it would give them “a huge advantage.” The rise of AI in codingWang’s comments come as artificial intelligence increasingly takes on the work of human coders at major tech companies. According to a report Entrepreneur, AI is now responsible for writing up to 30 per cent of project code at Microsoft and Google. The spread of tools such as Replit and Cursor, which generate functioning blocks of code from simple prompts, has popularised the concept of vibe-coding. Even non-technical users have managed to build apps and websites instructing AI in plain English. Wang argued that this shift marks a fundamental change in the role of engineers. “It’s impossible to understate the degree to which I’ve been radicalised AI coding,” he said. “I think that fundamentally, the role of an engineer is very different now than it was before.” About Alexandr WangWang co-founded Scale AI in 2016, a data labelling company for training artificial intelligence, after dropping out of MIT in his first year. He went on to lead the company for nearly a decade, building a net worth now estimated at $3.2 billion, according to Forbes. According to a report Entrepreneur, Wang announced in June that he would step down as Scale AI’s chief executive to join Meta. The social media giant invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI in exchange for a 49 per cent stake, more than doubling the company’s valuation from $14 billion to $29 billion. Wang now serves as Meta’s chief AI officer. On the podcast, he described AI’s ability to write code as a breakthrough moment. He predicted that within the next five years, AI models will be capable of generating “literally all the code” he has ever written.