Indian-origin man earns ₹18,000 per hour by training AI models, says 'money was never main motivation'
Indian-origin man in UK earns ₹18,000/hour from AI side gig while juggling multiple roles, including author, lecturer, and PhD student, saying 'money was never primary motivation'.
A 34-year-old Indian man based in the UK is earning $200 (around ₹18,000) an hour from a side gig training AI models. Utkarsh Amitabh had a packed schedule at the time of accepting the offer, but his "intellectual curiosity drew him in," CNBC reported.
In an interview with CNBC Make It, Utkarsh Amitabh said he was not seeking new opportunities when data-labelling startup micro1 reached out to him in January 2025. At that point, he was already juggling multiple roles — writing books, teaching at a university, leading the global mentorship platform Network Capital as its founder and CEO, and pursuing a PhD at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. He was, in addition, adjusting to life with a newborn at home.
However, he still agreed to take on the role as it matched his experience in "business strategy, financial modelling and tech,” he added.
Amitabh has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, a master's degree in moral philosophy, and spent more than six years at Microsoft working on cloud computing and AI partnerships.
According to the outlet, his previous work spans a book on the side-hustle economy as well as academic research exploring how artificial intelligence might transform human achievement.
The opportunity with the AI-based company was a "natural fit," for Amitabh, he said, while also lauding the flexible work hours of the job. As a freelancer, he worked on average roughly 3.5 hours each night after his 1-year-old daughter went to sleep.
“This didn’t seem like an add-on, but something that I could use to further my interests in a limited number of hours a week,” he said.
According to CNBC, Amitabh has so far earned close to $300,000 since January — which also includes bonuses.
He stated that money was never his primary motivation and he only considered “fair pay to be a core value." He further added that he found the compensation to be “respectable” for work that requires significant expertise.
AI and job displacement
Amitabh further acknowledged that training AI brings broader concerns about job displacement, but he maintains a balanced perspective. Drawing on projections from the World Economic Forum, he highlighted that while AI may eliminate certain roles, it is also expected to generate millions of new jobs worldwide by 2030. He emphasised that human expertise and machine intelligence are likely to evolve together through collaboration rather than competition.
“It’s also possible that this AI fear collectively empowers us to learn better, upskill ourselves and frame questions differently about ourselves. So I’m not concerned about the [idea of] AI Doom entirely, because I think it does far more good than bad,” he added.