While America’s labor market may not be collapsing, Moody’s Analytics has highlighted that it is inching steadily closer towards a key recession indicator, with analysts now placing the probability of an economic contraction at around 40%.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the unemployment rate for November edged up to 4.6%, continuing the creep higher that analysts have been nervously monitoring throughout the year. The BLS noted a meagre 64,000 roles were created last month, showing little net change from April this year.

While 4.6% is not a dire figure—around 4% is seen as a reasonable rate of unemployment in a relatively stable economy—it is markedly higher than last November, when it was 4.2%. But it’s not necessarily the rate of unemployment that is making economists nervous. Rather, it’s the broader trend of decline and what this demonstrates about the trajectory of the economy.

His goal: nothing less than superintelligence.

Wang, with his aerial view of the industry, has advice for kids, especially those in Gen Alpha now entering middle school: Forget gaming, sports, or traditional after-school hobbies. 

“If you are like 13 years old, you should spend all of your time vibe coding,” he said in his recent TBPN interview. “That’s how you should live your life.”

Why is this a generational moment for Gen Z?

For Wang, the reasoning is simple. Every engineer, himself included, is now writing code he believes will be obsolete within five years.

“Literally all the code I’ve written in my life will be replaced by what will be produced by an AI model,” he said.

That realization has left him, in his words, “radicalized by AI coding.” What matters most now isn’t syntax, or learning a particular language, but time spent experimenting with and steering AI tools.

“It’s actually an incredible moment of discontinuity,” Wang said. “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.”

Teenagers have a clear advantage over adults: time and freedom to immerse themselves in new technology. And while in the past, entrepreneurial teenagers leveraged this time to be “sneaker flippers” or run Minecraft servers, Wang says the focus should now be on the code.

He compares the moment to the dawn of the PC revolution. The Bill Gateses and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world had an “immense advantage” simply because they grew up tinkering with the earliest machines. 

“That moment is happening right now,” Wang said. “And the people who spend the most time with it will have the edge in the future economy.”

Is superintelligence coming?

Wang isn’t coy about Meta’s ambitions. He calls the company’s infrastructure, scale, and product distribution unmatched. 

“We have the business model to support building literally hundreds of billions of dollars of compute,” he said.

His team, just over 100 people, is deliberately designed to be “smaller and more talent dense” than rivals. “The other labs are like 10 times bigger,” Wang said, but their lab had “cracked” coders. 

The lab is split into three pillars: research, product, and infrastructure. Research builds the models Wang says will “ultimately be superintelligent.” Product ensures they get distributed across billions of users through Meta’s platforms. And infrastructure focuses on what he calls “literally the largest data centers in the world.”

Wang is particularly excited about hardware. Like many Meta executives now, he points to the company’s new smart glasses, which had a hilariously foppish demo, as the “natural delivery mechanism for superintelligence.”

Placed right next to the human senses, they will merge digital perception with cognition.

“It will literally feel like cognitive enhancement,” Wang said. “You will gain 100 IQ points by having your superintelligence right next to you.”

Why vibe coding matters

Vibe coding is the shorthand for this shift: using natural language prompts to generate and iterate on code. Rather than writing complex syntax, users describe their intent, and AI produces functioning prototypes.

The concept is spreading across Silicon Valley’s C-suites. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has said he can now test ideas in 20 minutes, instead of burning weeks of engineering cycles. Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that AI already generates more than 30% of new code at the company, calling it the biggest leap in software creation in 25 years.

Wang takes that further. For him, vibe coding isn’t just a productivity hack, but a future cultural mandate. What matters isn’t the code itself — it’s the hours of intuition-building that come from pushing AI tools to their limits, which is why he urges Gen Alpha to start early.

“The role of an engineer is just very different now than it was before,” he said. 

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on September 19, 2025.

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Calm chief executive David Ko, speaking to an audience at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference earlier this month, said his company did a survey of more than 250 C-suite executives, and posed a simple question to them: “How are you doing?”

“Most people said that they were doing good,” Ko said.

But when Ko broke down wellness metrics, from if leaders felt anxious or depressed to mentally present at work, the results were starkly different: 48% of respondents reported being overwhelmed, and a quarter said they were feeling anxiety or depression. Moreover, 34% said they were mentally drained, and 40% reported being unable to be mentally present on the job. Half of the survey participants said they thought of stepping down from their positions.

Ko also asked executives to compare their energy to a battery, arguing it’s a more accessible metric for individuals to assess their mental health. Only one in four executives said their batteries were “fully recharged.”

“Most leaders, like in this room, are operating at about 20%,” Ko said. “Think about what that means.”

The cost of CEO burnout

Burnout, which the majority of small-to-medium business executives report feeling, can not only result in leaders taking more sick days, higher absenteeism, and greater turnover, but can also gnaw at companies’ bottom lines. A study published by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in April found burned-out workers can cost a workplace an average of $3,999 per hourly worker, and up to more than $20,000 per executive. The social contagion effect, in which employees pick up on the mood of their colleague or superior, can result in a “downward spiral” for the whole office, human resources experts said.

Ko said companies that have invested in mental health interventions report less burnout, higher returns in investments, and greater engagement. Nearly 85% of individuals Calm surveyed reported believing mental health directly impacts a company’s bottom line.

The CEO said mental health interventions, such as using a mindfulness app like Calm, can help employees process AI anxiety, particularly amid growing concerns of AI displacing human workers. According to a Pew Research Center report from February, more than half of employees surveyed said they’re worried about the impact of the technology in the workplace in the future. Calm, for its part, has integrated AI-guided meditations into its app, and Ko suggested his mindfulness app can not only alleviate AI anxiety through mindfulness, but also by having users engage with AI directly.

“In a world that’s currently being transformed by AI, organizations are realizing that our greatest assets aren’t just the technology,” he said. “It’s the people behind them.”