13yo Chinese AI whiz dubbed 'future Elon Musk' after hackathon wins

A 13-year-old from Hangzhou in eastern China has drawn around 500,000 social media followers and the "future Elon Musk" nickname after winning various hackathon awards by using AI to solve everyday problems. Yang Xizhe, an eighth-grader at Fuchun Middle School in the city's Fuyang District, rose to prominence in early 2025. That was when a video showing how he used AI to memorize English vocabulary drew 20 million views, local newspaper Dushi Express reported on Sept. 15.He used Doubao, ByteDance's AI chatbot, to weave new words into stories, run dictation drills with corrections and generate quizzes.This year, he has entered three hackathons. According to Dushi Express, his team won first place at Moonshot 48, a hackathon for secondary school students, with an AI vision system that helps visually impaired people apply makeup.At HackMIT China, a youth edition of the student-run MIT hackathon held in Shenzhen in March, his team built an AI-powered lunchbox that shows parents what their children eat at school. It won a Best Pitch Award and second place in its category, the South China Morning Post reported.In April, Yang and three other junior secondary students took on adult teams at social media platform RedNote's first hackathon championship.Their tool for diagnosing and improving creators' posts won the event's "AI Native" special award, and a company offered to buy it for 100,000 yuan ($14,900), according to Dushi Express. Yang Xizhe talks about programming at an event in 2025. Photo courtesy of Yang Xizhe website Chinese tech KOLs have hailed Yang as a "future Elon Musk," although he and his parents have played down the comparison.Yang began programming in second grade with Scratch, a visual coding platform, and switched to C++ before fifth grade.He started using AI in 2023, when his father suggested he ask a chatbot about a coding problem his parents could not solve, according to Dushi Express. He now relies on "vibe coding," describing what he wants in plain language and letting AI write the code.He likens AI to a multiplier and the user to the base number. "If you yourself are zero, whatever you multiply by, you still get zero," he told the 21st Century Business Herald.Some Chinese bloggers have called him "a future Elon Musk," but Yang and his parents have played down the label.He sets aside three hours a day for programming and AI and aims to keep his grades above average. His homeroom teacher told Hangzhou TV that he ranks around 50th in his grade.Chinese tech companies are increasingly courting teenage talent. Tencent launched AI and robotics camps for students aged 13 to 18 in June, citing a McKinsey estimate that China could be short 5 million AI workers by 2030.Yang hopes to become a programmer or AI researcher. "If I can, I hope to bring even a little change to the world," he told Dushi Express.