Alexandr Wang, a 28-year-old billionaire and co-founder of Scale AI, took to X (formerly Twitter) to share his recent coding revelation. He highlighted the unique importance of AI with respect to young people. Forbes now estimates Wang’s net worth at $3.2 billion. On that score, he has quickly shot to the top of the class in the tech industry. To address this, he co-founded Scale AI in 2016. Since then, the company’s growth has exploded and it is currently valued at about $29 billion – a true tech unicorn.
In June, Wang officially took the reins as Meta’s new chief AI officer. This appointment followed a record-setting $14 billion collaboration between the tech behemoth and the state. His experience in building and scaling AI technologies has positioned him as a leading voice in the industry, particularly regarding the future of coding and AI tools.
“Literally all the code I’ve written in my life … will be able to have been produced by an AI model within the next five years,” Wang said. He noted that these days AI coding apps enable even toddlers to output 30% of the code. These tools allow just about anyone to create applications — even those without deep programming or engineering expertise. This level of accessibility removes barriers for a wealth of people who otherwise might have been too intimidated by the technical nature of coding.
Wang thinks that entrepreneurs who understand software and coding inside and out will come out on top. This understanding will equip them to communicate their detailed intentions more effectively to AIs. “One of the most important skills in the future will be the ability to tell a computer exactly what you want, so it can do that for you,” he stated. It is this newfound superpower of specificity and detail that will make the future human-machine collaboration smarter, more powerful, and infinitely more creative.
He challenged teenagers to do as Bill Gates had done. Gates devoted his teenage years to becoming the best computer programmer he could be. That’s the way you need to go through life, Wang said, making the case for a pervasive culture of learning and experimentation with AI tools.
Wang’s excitement for the new world of AI-enabled coding is contagious, calling this period in time “an amazing moment of discontinuity.” He believes that those who invest around 10,000 hours experimenting with these tools will gain a substantial edge over their peers. “If you just happen to spend, like, 10,000 hours playing with the tools and figuring out how to use them better than other people, that’s a huge advantage,” he explained.
Andrew Ng is one of the leading voices in AI advocacy and development, and co-founder of Google Brain. He expressed the same desire to get kids into coding! “As coding becomes easier, more people should code, not fewer!” Ng stated. With that democratization of coding skills, he told Ring, lies the opportunity of preparing future generations of people for the world we’re heading towards—one that’s really technology-driven.