Meet the 13-year-old looking to cash in on the AI boom

Michael Goldstein had quite the summer before high school.

After a month of overnight camp, the 13-year-old Torontonian made his way to San Francisco for a tech entrepreneur conference, a meeting with OpenAI founder Sam Altman, and visits to the headquarters of AI companies and venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz. It was like a star athlete’s college-recruiting trip, only Goldstein isn’t known for throwing touchdowns. He’s just obsessed with AI.

Goldstein is something of an archetype of the modern tech aspirant. The words he uses, the questions he ponders, the promises he makes: It’s of a piece with his older counterparts in technology, who tell The Standard that their inboxes in recent months have been filling up with cold emails and DMs from teenagers. 

Cory Levy, the founder of Z Fellows, a startup activator based in San Francisco, has accepted teens as young as 15 into his program over the last two years. “Today’s youth is way smarter than yesterday’s because of tools like ChatGPT,” he said.

Richard Zheng, an 18-year-old filmmaker who makes commercials for AI companies, met up with Goldstein in SF after the latter slid into his DMs asking for advice, as is his wont. 

Zheng, who also got into the tech scene at the age of 13,  said AI is the new fad among kids these days, like SnapChat and TikTok were before. “We’re so easy to adapt to any new thing that comes into our lives. [AI] is already being integrated into every aspect of life.”

Goldstein spoke to The Standard between one of his first days of high school and hockey practice. His life has calmed down since the summer, he said, but he remains locked in on how many engagements he’s getting on X, where he posts serially.

Goldstein “can only half-code,” he admitted. “Like most people do,” he watched YouTube tutorials to learn how to use Cursor, an app that codes for you if given the right prompt. 

The term “vibe coding (opens in new tab)” was coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February, when he described it as code created by the English language with AI doing the rest. In his words, vibe coding is like heat exhaustion at a music festival. It’s when “you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists,” he posted on X (opens in new tab).

Goldstein is feeling those vibes, both at and away from the computer screen. What he lacks in experience he makes up for in aura. On his trip to SF, Goldstein Waymo-ed around the city with his mom, pitching his ideas to VCs, and asking Altman three questions — one more than he thought the CEO would allow.

The youngster reached out to Altman by cold-emailing his assistant to tell him he would be pitching his AI agent at the Founders Inc. Demo Day conference at Fort Mason on Aug. 1. Altman’s assistant suggested that Goldstein come to the OpenAI headquarters, where he could receive a tour and speak with the CEO in his office.

When the teenager arrived, he wanted to talk shop. “When do I know to quit a startup?” he asked Altman.

“When you don’t want to work on it anymore,” he recalls the CEO responding.

Then, Goldstein explained that he is running out of money, and wanted to know how much to ask for. Altman allegedly told him “to ask a16z for a $100,000 investment.” 

OpenAI did not respond to request for comment.

Goldstein took the advice. While he didn’t get an investment from a16z, last week, he officially pivoted away from his startup called Neatly — which he said was “an advanced computer-use agent … that actually controls the computer” — to Kodo (opens in new tab), which he claims is the “world’s most powerful AI design agent.”

Goldstein knows it’s an uphill climb to put himself among the Mount Rushmore of software entrepreneurs. But he’s gonna grind as hard as he can, one line of AI-generated code at a time.

“It’s a hard mountain to crack,” he acknowledged, “when there’s so many startups trying to do very similar things.”

Lisa Cherns, Goldstein’s mother, said that in sixth grade her son built drones and ran a weather balloon business. When her son managed to send a balloon high enough to see the curvature of the Earth, she realized “he can achieve anything he sets his mind to.”

That was before he got into AI this year. “Michael has been completely independent in this AI journey,” she said. 

Many in the tech space can relate to Goldstein’s hunger. After all, the invention of the internet and its applications is largely a story of kids just a bit older than Goldstein, including guys like Zuckerberg and Altman, messing with code in their college dorm rooms.

“My impression of [Goldstein] is that he moves fast, has high agency, and still enjoys kid things,” said Jia Chen, a recent college dropout and AI founder who lives in San Francisco and chats with Goldstein regularly on X. “I think he’s genuinely passionate about it.”

But Goldstein-like figures have not gone without criticism from within the tech community. “If you’re 12, bro go be a kid,” Vasuman Moza, the founder of an AI agent tool, wrote on X (opens in new tab). “Even if you do exit for a billion dollars, you’ll regret not having a fkn childhood. If you’re encouraging this behavior you drank the Silicon Valley VC Koolaid and/or are milking this for your own brand image.”

Despite the excitement from the tech community at the very young batch of AI entrepreneurs, it remains a real policy question whether kids will maintain unfettered access to AI chatbots in the future — let alone whether they will be able to create AI businesses with little regulation.

Last month, OpenAI came out with parental controls (opens in new tab) on its chatbot after the company came under fire for allegedly instructing a 16-year-old how to make a noose to kill himself. Just last week, the alleged arsonist responsible for the Palisades Fire in January was said to have used ChatGPT for advice.

Senate Bill 243 (opens in new tab), which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law last week, now requires companies to “issue a clear and conspicuous notification indicating that the companion chatbot is artificially generated and not human,” so as not to confuse the little ones. The LEAD for Kids Act (opens in new tab), which Newsom vetoed last week out of fears it could “unintentionally lead to a total ban” on AI, plotted to outlaw chatbots unless they were able to prove they won’t foreseeably cause damage to youth, such as by offering health advice or encouraging them to do drugs.

In the meantime, kids are being sold AI.

A company Goldstein visited in SF, Cluely, advertises itself as a way to cheat in school, and OpenAI has partnered with companies like Mattel (opens in new tab) to build AI toys for kids. Young nerds today still have complete access not only to AI chatbots but also to open-source AI tools they can use to develop their own products. It’s not unfathomable to think that someone as young as Goldstein could make something useful in the near future.

“He’s part of an emerging generation of post-vibe-coding developers, where they see AI as a way to get things done,” said Gever Tulley, founder of the private, project-based Tinkering School in SF. “The next Greta Thunberg will be a 13-year-old ecowarrior uncovering corporate malfeasance using AI to do deep analysis on freely available data.”

Goldstein reckons that he was born with the temperament of a businessman. Like many of his fellow teens and tech founders, he also can’t help engaging in a bit of self-aggrandizement. 

When I asked him why, deep down, he’s motivated to build AI and how it will benefit society, he fished for a soundbite. “You can quote me on this,” he said. “It’s fun to make things people use.”