Meet Yang Xizhe. He stands at a towering 1.9 metres tall, is just 13 years old, and social media commentators are already calling him the future Elon Musk.
Forget traditional studying methods. Based in Hangzhou, this junior high school student treats artificial intelligence like oxygen. It is everywhere, and he uses it constantly. Back in February, a single clip of him using the chatbot Doubao to master English vocabulary pulled in 20 million views. Instead of rote memorisation, he fed word lists into the system to generate custom stories and targeted exercises. You might also find this similar article insightful: Why Anthropic Admitting Claude Is Building Itself Changes Everything.
Parents noticed. Teachers took notes. But Yang didn't stop at viral study tricks.
Most teenagers play video games until their eyes hurt. Yang decided to build them instead. Back in primary school, after burning through The Legend of Zelda, he wanted to make his own digital worlds. His dad pointed him toward Scratch. He picked it up fast, then pushed forward into C++ and vibe coding. As discussed in latest reports by Gizmodo, the effects are worth noting.
That early curiosity turned into real products. This year, Yang stepped out of his bedroom and straight into high-stakes hackathons.
At the Moonshot 48 Hackathon, his team built an AI vision system to help visually impaired individuals apply makeup. It won first place. Next came HackMIT China 2026, where his smart lunchbox prototype—equipped with sensors and computer vision to track dietary habits and update parents—won the Best Pitch Award and secured second place in its category.
By April, he formed a team averaging just 13 years of age for RedNote's hackathon. They created an AI-powered diagnostic tool for original content creators. A company immediately offered 100,000 yuan, roughly 15,000 US dollars, to buy it.
Neither of his parents work in tech. They had to learn how artificial intelligence works just to keep up with their son's relentless pace. Meanwhile, Yang balances school with his projects. He sticks to a strict rule: keep above-average grades, lock in three hours of programming daily, and ignore the media hype.
Labels like "young genius" sound great for headlines. But Yang wants to build things that actually matter. Whether he turns out to be the next major tech mogul or an elite researcher, he is already proving that age means nothing when you know how to build with code.
