Meta’s chief AI officer calls on young people to join the wave of “ambient programming”

Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang called on teenagers to invest thousands of hours in learning and experimenting with AI tools, saying this will become a new generation's "Gates and Zuckerberg moment." In an interview with TBPN Podcast during the Meta Connect 2025 conference in September, he proposed that AI should be learned in a "vibe-coding" way - controlling intelligent coding assistants through natural language to combine creativity and technology.

Wang said: "If you are 13 years old now, you should spend all your time on vibe-coding. This is your computing revolution moment." He compared the current AI wave to the personal computer revolution in the 1980s, emphasizing that experimentation and AI assistants will bring huge competitive advantages in the future economy.

The word "vibe-coding" was first proposed by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in February 2025. It quickly became popular in the industry and was named the 2025 Word of the Year by Collins Dictionary. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has also mentioned using vibe-coding tools such as Cursor and Replit to create web pages. Wang believes: "If you spend 10,000 hours playing with AI tools and constantly optimizing how to use them, that will be an overwhelming advantage." AI pioneer Andrew Ng also echoed that now is "the best era to learn programming."

Wang's speech comes as Meta is undergoing a reorganization of its AI department. In October, the company laid off about 600 people at Superintelligence Labs, involving AI infrastructure and research positions, but the new department led by Wang was not affected. He said in an internal letter that streamlining the team can "improve the efficiency of decision-making and allow each member to assume greater responsibility and influence."

Despite the downsizing, Meta continues to invest heavily in AI. CEO Mark Zuckerberg called 2025 "a decisive year for AI" and plans to invest US$60 billion to US$65 billion in building AI infrastructure.

Alexander Wang joined Meta in June 2025, after Meta acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI, which he founded, for US$14.3 billion. The 28-year-old co-leads Meta Superintelligence Labs with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, leading the company to compete with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft for super AI systems.