World's youngest self-made billionaire names one thing 'everyone' should learn

2 weeks ago 8

Scale AI Co-Founder And Chief Executive Officer Alexandr Wang Interview

Alexandr Wang became the youngest-ever billionaire (Image: Getty)

At 24, many Brits are still in their first jobs, living with their parents and still socialising with friends they made at university. But at the same age Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang was sitting on his first billion.

Wang, who was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1997, had been obsessed with computer programming from his earliest years. 

He briefly attended the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then worked as an algorithm developer at a commodity trading company before striking out on his own with Scale AI, the software company that made him the world’s youngest-ever billionaire at 24.

It’s a career path that any young person could follow, he says, and that today's teenagers should be spending every spare moment leaning about AI coding.

Speaking on the TBPN podcast, he said that getting a handle on AI coding is crucial: “You just have to figure out how to use the tools maximally. It’s impossible to understate the degree to which I’ve been radicalised by AI coding.”

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Wang urged every 13-year-old to get involved in AI coding (Image: Getty)

AI coding, using tools such as Qodo, GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, gives a massive boost to programmers’ capabilities and efficiency. Taking the donkey-work out of day-to-day jobs such as debugging and code formatting, AI can also in the hands of an expert, be used to delve deeper into coding.

He predicts that in the future, a lot of the work being done by coders today will be taken by AI in the near future. Wang continued: “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.” 

That shouldn’t put young people off learning about coding, according to Google Brain research lab co-founder Andrew Ng. “As coding becomes easier, more people should code, not fewer,” he said.

Scale AI Co-Founder And Chief Executive Officer Alexandr Wang Interview

Wang says in fiver years' time, AI will be creating a lot of computer code (Image: Getty)

 “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.”

And Wang agrees, saying that that the world of software is at a tipping-point. “That moment is happening right now — and if you are, like, 13 years old, you should spend all of your time [AI coding],” he said. “That’s how you should live your life.”

Referring to author Malcolm Gladwells’s maxim that anyone can be an expert after 10,000 hours of practice, Wang says that success is all about putting in the hours: “It’s actually, in some ways, this incredible moment of discontinuity where, if you just happen to spend 10,000 hours playing with the tools and figuring out how to use them better than other people, that’s a huge advantage.”

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