Alexandr Wang says that the next Bill Gates will be a 13 -year -old child who is “coding” at the moment
Alexandr Wang – who has become the youngest self -taught billionaire in the world at 24 – is now, at 28, heads one of the most ambitious AI efforts in Silicon Valley. During his first 60 days in Meta, he built a laboratory of 100 people he described to TBPN hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hayes as “smaller and dense than all other laboratories”.
Its objective: nothing less than superintendent.
Wang, with his air vision of the industry, has advice for children, especially those of Gen Alpha who are now entering college: forget the game, sports or hobby after school.
“If you are 13, you should spend all your time coding,” he said in his recent TBPN interview. “This is how you should live your life.”
A generational moment
For Wang, the reasoning is simple. Each engineer, himself included, now writes code which, according to him, will be obsolete within five years.
“Literally all the code I have written in my life will be replaced by what will be produced by an AI model,” he said.
This achievement left him, in his words, “radicalized by the coding of the AI”. What matters most is not syntax, nor learning a particular language, but the time spent experimenting and directing AI tools.
“It’s actually an incredible moment of discontinuity,” said Wang. “If you simply spend 10,000 hours playing with the tools and finding how to use them better than others, it’s a huge advantage.”
Teenagers have a clear advantage over adults: time and freedom to immerse themselves in new technologies. And while in the past, entrepreneurial adolescents have exploited this time to be “sneakers swimmers” or Minecraft servers, Wang says attention should now be on the code.
He compares the moment at the dawn of the PC revolution. The Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world had a “immense advantage” simply because they grew up by tinkering with the first machines.
“This moment happens right now,” said Wang. “And people who spend the most time with this will have the advantage in the future economy.”
Building for superintendent
Wang is not shy in Meta’s ambitions. It calls for the infrastructure, scale and distribution of unrivaled company products.
“We have the business model to support the construction literally hundreds of billions of dollars in calculation,” he said.
His team, just over 100 people, is deliberately designed to be “smaller and denser of talents” than its rivals. “The other laboratories are like 10 times bigger,” said Wang, but their laboratory had “cracked” coders.
The laboratory is divided into three pillars: research, product and infrastructure. Research builds the models that Wang says “will ultimately be supentiligent”. The product guarantees that they are distributed between billions of users via Meta platforms. And the infrastructure focuses on what it literally calls the largest data centers in the world “.
Wang is particularly enthusiastic about equipment. Like many Meta leaders now, he highlights the company’s new smart glasses, which had a hilarious FOPPISH demo, such as the “natural delivery mechanism for superintendent”.
Placed right next to human senses, they will merge digital perception with cognition.
“It will literally look like a cognitive improvement,” said Wang. “You will win 100 Qi points by having your superintendent right next to you.”
Why the mood coding is important
The coding of the atmosphere is the shortcut for this change: to use invites in natural language to generate and iterate on the code. Rather than writing a complex syntax, users describe their intention and AI produces functional prototypes.
The concept is propagated on the C plans of Silicon Valley. Klarna CEO, Sebastian, Siemiatkowski, said he could now test ideas in 20 minutes, instead of burning weeks of engineering cycles. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, revealed that AI already generates more than 30% of the new company code, calling it the largest jump in software creation in 25 years.
Wang goes further. For him, the mood coding is not only a productivity hack, but a future cultural mandate. What matters is not the code itself – these are the hours of intuition creation that come from the push of AI tools to their limits, which is why he urges Gen Alpha to start early.
“The role of an engineer is simply very different now than before,” he said.
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