Meta’s chief AI officer Alexander Wang
Meta’s chief AI officer has one message for teenagers: put down everything else and start learning to code with artificial intelligence (AI). Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a similar case in June, saying it no longer matters whether someone has ever learned to code in the traditional sense, since natural language now works as a programming language of its own for prompting AI. For Wang, the point for teenagers is simple: the sooner AI coding becomes second nature, the better placed they’ll be for a job market it’s already reshaping. Get the latest Education News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.
At Microsoft and Google, AI tools reportedly write up to 30% of the code used in company projects, a shift Wang said has reshaped how he sees his own profession. Wang left MIT after his freshman year to start Scale AI, a data-labeling company for AI training, in 2016, and ran it as chief executive officer (CEO) for nearly a decade. That run made him the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, with a net worth of $2 billion, according to Forbes. In June, Wang announced he was leaving Scale AI to join Meta after the company invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI for a 49% stake and access to its talent, including Wang. The deal roughly doubled Scale AI’s valuation, from $14 billion to $29 billion.
“If you are, like, 13 years old, you should spend all of your time vibe-coding,” Wang said. “It’s impossible to understate the degree to which I’ve been radicalized by AI coding,” he said. He predicted that within five years, AI models will be able to produce most of the code written for real projects, including, in his words, “literally all the code” he has ever written himself.
“That’s how you should live your life. Wang’s comments come as AI takes on a growing share of the coding work at large technology companies. “I think that fundamentally, the role of an engineer is very different now than it was before.
Why he wants teens starting early
Alexandr Wang, 28, who co-founded Scale AI before dropping out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said on the TBPN podcast earlier this month that young people should treat what’s known as vibe-coding, using AI tools to write code from plain English instructions, as close to a full-time pursuit. He pointed to the familiar theory that mastery takes around 10,000 hours, and said teenagers who put in that kind of time with AI coding tools now would come out ahead.
“That’s a huge advantage,” Wang said. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in June that he had used AI to vibe-code a webpage himself. Wang’s advice leans on the idea that early, sustained practice builds an edge that’s hard to catch up on later. Tools such as Replit and Cursor have made this kind of learning accessible even to people with no coding background, letting them build apps and websites just by describing what they want.