Meta AI Chief gives valuable advice to young teens, says learn from Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg

Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang has shared advice for young teens who want to be successful in the future. The 28-year-old AI executive had earlier led Scale AI before Meta took a 49% stake in the AI startup.

Speaking on the TBPN podcast, Wang said that current 13-year-olds should follow the example of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg to learn the new technology and have a “huge advantage” in the future. Wang drew parallels between the current AI age and the time when personal computers arrived and said that young adults may even have an edge over adults.

Alexandr Wang’s advice to 13-year-olds:

“It’s almost like when personal computers first came about, or just computing in general — the people who spent the most time with them, or who grew up with it, had this immense advantage in the future economy, like Bill Gates or even the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. I think that moment is happening right now.”

“If you are like 13 years old, you should spend all your time coding and just, you know, that's how you live your life,” he added.

“I think it’s actually in some ways an incredible moment of discontinuity where if you just happen to spend like 10,000 hours playing with the tools and figure out how to use them better than other people, that’s a huge advantage,” he further noted.

Wang’s advice to young adults is to spend all their time learning how to use the new AI tools and “vibe code” new things with them. In case you aren't aware, vibe coding is a new approach to software development where developers use natural-language prompts to get a product developed via an AI tool.

The term was coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, with the idea that developers can use AI to “fully give in to the vibes” and “forget the code even exists.” The phenomenon has been rapidly evolving the tech landcape in the last few years with companies boasting about their new model's ability to vibe code software or website for users with simple text prompts.

Notably, Wang became the youngest self-made billionaire at the age of 25 by embracing the power of AI with his startup Scale AI, which he launched at the age of 19.

Earlier this year, Zuckerberg’s Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, which valued the startup at over $29 billion.