Business
Gen Z billionaire Alexandr Wang tells 13-year olds they should be more like Bill Gates, who snuck out of the house to code at night
Scale AI billionaire Alexandr Wang says “vibe-coding” is today’s Bill Gates moment—time spent hands-on with AI tools now could compound into a career-defining advantage later. His advice: log thousands of hours experimenting with AI coding assistants and workflows.
“If you are 13 years old, you should spend all of your time vibe-coding. That’s how you should live your life,” the 28-year-old Meta chief AI officer said on the TBPN podcast, adding that 10,000 hours of deep practice with the tools can become a “huge advantage.”
The rise of vibe coding
Vibe-coding typically refers to using AI to generate and refine software through natural language prompts, paired with unstructured tinkering to learn the tools’ limits and workflows. Wang argues the mindset mirrors the early grit of founders like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg—and that the same “be there early, go deep” dynamic is unfolding again.
“When personal computers first came about, the people who spent the most time with it and grew up with it had this immense advantage in the future economy—like the Bill Gates, even the Mark Zuckerberg’s of the world,” the Gen Z co-founder said. “I think that moment is happening right now.”
The broader shift in tech
Other business leaders from Google and Klarna are also embracing vibe-coding as productivity boosters. Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna previously said AI programming tools now allow him to build prototypes in just 20 minutes, work that used to take weeks of back-and-forth with engineering.
The need for aspiring tech workers to gain more AI skills is also becoming more urgent. With entry-level tech jobs shrinking as companies prioritize automation, many young people are increasingly anxious about their future job security.
“I think it’s actually in some ways this incredible moment of discontinuity,” Wang added. “If you just happen to spend 10,000 hours playing with the tools and figure out how to use them better than other people, that’s a huge advantage.”
Wang is now leading in Meta’s AI superintelligence team
In 2022, Wang became the youngest self-made billionaire at 25. His start up, Scale AI is valued at around $7 billion, which he started around age 19.
This June, Zuckerberg handed him the keys to Meta’s entire AI operation in a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, searching as the company’s first-ever chief AI officer, leading the new superintelligence team.
“It’s impossible to understate the degree to which I’ve been radicalized by AI coding,” Wang said. “You just have to figure out how to use the tools maximally.”
