{"id":191874,"date":"2025-12-19T14:30:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T14:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/191874\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T14:30:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T14:30:08","slug":"alexandr-wang-says-the-next-bill-gates-will-be-a-13-year-old-who-is-vibe-coding-right-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/191874\/","title":{"rendered":"Alexandr Wang says the next Bill Gates will be a 13-year-old who is ‘vibe coding’ right now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alexandr Wang\u2014who became the world\u2019s youngest self-made billionaire at 24\u2014is now, at 28, running one of the most ambitious AI efforts in Silicon Valley. In his first 60 days at Meta<\/a>, he built a 100-person lab he described<\/a> to TBPN hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays<\/a> as \u201csmaller and more talent dense than any of the other labs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

His goal: nothing less than superintelligence.<\/p>\n

Wang, with his aerial view of the industry, has advice for kids, especially those in Gen Alpha now entering middle school: Forget gaming, sports, or traditional after-school hobbies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you are like 13 years old, you should spend all of your time vibe coding,\u201d he said in his recent TBPN interview. \u201cThat\u2019s how you should live your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why is this a generational moment for Gen Z?<\/p>\n

For Wang, the reasoning is simple. Every engineer, himself included, is now writing code he believes will be obsolete within five years.<\/p>\n

\u201cLiterally all the code I\u2019ve written in my life will be replaced by what will be produced by an AI model,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

That realization has left him, in his words, \u201cradicalized by AI coding.\u201d What matters most now isn\u2019t syntax, or learning a particular language, but time spent experimenting with and steering AI tools.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s actually an incredible moment of discontinuity,\u201d Wang said. \u201cIf you just happen to spend 10,000 hours playing with the tools and figuring out how to use them better than other people, that\u2019s a huge advantage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teenagers have a clear advantage over adults: time and freedom to immerse themselves in new technology. And while in the past, entrepreneurial teenagers leveraged this time to be \u201csneaker flippers\u201d or run Minecraft servers, Wang says the focus should now be on the code.<\/p>\n

He compares the moment to the dawn of the PC revolution. The Bill Gateses and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world had an \u201cimmense advantage\u201d simply because they grew up tinkering with the earliest machines.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThat moment is happening right now,\u201d Wang said. \u201cAnd the people who spend the most time with it will have the edge in the future economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is superintelligence coming?<\/p>\n

Wang isn\u2019t coy about Meta\u2019s ambitions. He calls the company\u2019s infrastructure, scale, and product distribution unmatched.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have the business model to support building literally hundreds of billions of dollars of compute,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

His team, just over 100 people, is deliberately designed to be \u201csmaller and more talent dense\u201d than rivals. \u201cThe other labs are like 10 times bigger,\u201d Wang said, but their lab had \u201ccracked\u201d coders.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The lab is split into three pillars: research, product, and infrastructure. Research builds the models Wang says will \u201cultimately be superintelligent.\u201d Product ensures they get distributed across billions of users through Meta\u2019s platforms. And infrastructure focuses on what he calls \u201cliterally the largest data centers in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wang is particularly excited about hardware. Like many Meta executives now, he points to the company\u2019s new smart glasses, which had a hilariously foppish<\/a> demo, as the \u201cnatural delivery mechanism for superintelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Placed right next to the human senses, they will merge digital perception with cognition.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt will literally feel like cognitive enhancement,\u201d Wang said. \u201cYou will gain 100 IQ points by having your superintelligence right next to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why vibe coding matters<\/p>\n

Vibe coding is the shorthand for this shift: using natural language prompts to generate and iterate on code. Rather than writing complex syntax, users describe their intent, and AI produces functioning prototypes.<\/p>\n

The concept is spreading across Silicon Valley\u2019s C-suites. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has said<\/a> he can now test ideas in 20 minutes, instead of burning weeks of engineering cycles. Google<\/a> CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that AI already generates<\/a> more than 30% of new code at the company, calling it the biggest leap in software creation in 25 years.<\/p>\n

Wang takes that further. For him, vibe coding isn\u2019t just a productivity hack, but a future cultural mandate. What matters isn\u2019t the code itself \u2014 it\u2019s the hours of intuition-building that come from pushing AI tools to their limits, which is why he urges Gen Alpha to start early.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe role of an engineer is just very different now than it was before,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A version of this story was published on\u00a0Fortune.com on September 19, 2025.<\/p>\n

More on Meta:<\/p>\n

Join us at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit May 19\u201320, 2026, in Atlanta. The next era of workplace innovation is here\u2014and the old playbook is being rewritten. At this exclusive, high-energy event, the world\u2019s most innovative leaders will convene to explore how AI, humanity, and strategy converge to redefine, again, the future of work. Register now<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alexandr Wang\u2014who became the world\u2019s youngest self-made billionaire at 24\u2014is now, at 28, running one of the most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,5187,13853,4037,75,119594,19363,367,23320,898,111,139,69,7718,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-191874","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-bill-gates","12":"tag-code","13":"tag-coding","14":"tag-engineering","15":"tag-evergreen-refresh","16":"tag-founders","17":"tag-google","18":"tag-klarna","19":"tag-meta","20":"tag-new-zealand","21":"tag-newzealand","22":"tag-nz","23":"tag-silicon-valley","24":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}