After becoming the youngest self-made billionaire in history at the age of 24, Alexandr Wang is currently leading one of Silicon Valley’s most ambitious AI initiatives at the age of 28. “Smaller and more talent dense than any of the other labs,” he talks, about the 100-person lab he created in his first 60 days at Meta.
He aimed for superintelligence, nothing less.
Having an aerial view on the business, Wang advises children, particularly those in Gen Alpha who are starting middle school, to forget about sports, gaming, and conventional after-school activities.
He recently stated in an interview that “if you are like 13 years old, you should spend all of your time vibe coding.” You should spend your life that way.
A generational moment
The logic for Wang is straightforward. Now, every engineer—including himself—writes code that he thinks will become outdated in five years.
“What an AI model will produce will literally replace all the code I’ve written in my life,” he stated.
He describes this insight as having “radicalized him by AI coding.” Syntax or understanding a certain language are no longer as important as spending time experimenting with and managing artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
“It’s a truly remarkable instance of discontinuity,” Wang stated. A significant advantage is gained if you just chance to spend 10,000 hours experimenting with the tools and learning how to utilize them more effectively than others.
Teens have an advantage over adults: they have more time and flexibility to use new technology. Additionally, Wang argues the emphasis should now be on the coding, whereas previously, enterprising teens used this time to operate Minecraft servers or be “sneaker flippers.”
He likens it to the beginning of the PC revolution. The “immense advantage” enjoyed by the Bill Gateses and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world stemmed from their upbringing experimenting with the earliest machines.
According to Wang, “that moment is happening right now.” And in the economy of the future, those who use it the most will have an advantage.
Developing superintelligence
Wang is open about Meta’s goals. He describes the company’s product distribution, scalability, and infrastructure as unmatched.
“Our business model is capable of supporting the construction of literally hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of computing,” he stated.
His workforce of just over 100 individuals is intentionally created to be “smaller and more talent dense” than competitors. The other laboratories are around ten times larger, Wang added, but theirs had “cracked” programmers.
The three pillars of the lab are infrastructure, product, and research. According to Wang, research develops the models that will eventually be superintelligent. Through Meta’s platforms, the product guarantees distribution to billions of consumers. Additionally, infrastructure concentrates on what he refers to as “absolutely the largest data centers on the planet.”
Wang is really enthusiastic about hardware. Like many current Meta executives, he cites the “natural delivery mechanism for superintelligence” as the company’s new smart glasses, which featured a wonderfully goofy demo.
They will combine digital perception and cognition when placed directly next to the human senses.
According to Wang, it will genuinely feel like cognitive improvement. “Having your superintelligence at your side will increase your IQ by 100 points.”
The importance of vibe coding
The abbreviation for this change is vibe coding, which involves generating and improving code in response to natural language inputs. Users explain what they want, and AI creates functional prototypes instead of writing complicated syntax.
The idea is gaining traction among C-suites in Silicon Valley. Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, claims that he can now test concepts in 20 minutes as opposed to using weeks of engineering cycles. More than 30% of new code at Google is already generated by AI, according to CEO Sundar Pichai, who described it as the largest advancement in software development in 25 years.
Wang goes farther than that. For him, vibe coding is a cultural requirement of the future rather than merely a productivity trick. The hours of intuition-building that come from pushing AI tools to their limits are more important than the code itself, which is why he advises Gen Alpha to begin early.
According to him, the job of an engineer has changed significantly throughout the years.
