UK-Based Indian Entrepreneur Earns Rs 18,000 An Hour From AI Side Hustle

An Indian-origin entrepreneur based in the United Kingdom has revealed that he earns $200 (around Rs 18,000) per hour by working part-time to train artificial intelligence (AI) models, all while managing multiple professional roles.

For Utkarsh Amitabh, the part-time AI training job is just another task in his busy schedule. He is also an author, university lecturer and a PhD student at Oxford University's Saïd Business School. Amitabh is also the founder and CEO of Network Capital, a global mentorship and careers platform.

Speaking to CNBC’s Make It, the 34-year-old entrepreneur said that he was balancing his professional duties with a newborn at home in January, when he was approached by data labelling startup micro1 to join its network of human experts that support companies in training artificial intelligence models.

Amitabh said that the job felt like a perfect fit with his background in “business strategy, financial modelling and tech”. He agreed to the role, admitting that “intellectual curiosity drew me in," the CNBC report added.

The part-time, freelance opportunity with micro1 was also flexible. Amitabh works roughly 3.5 hours every night, normally after his one-year-old daughter goes 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,” Amitabh told CNBC.

The 34-year-old now earns $200 per hour for his work with micro1. A company spokesman told the outlet that Amitabh has earned almost $3,00,000 (Rs 2.69 crore) for his work since January. The amount also includes project completion bonuses.

For Amitabh, “money was less of a motivator” compared to the role’s overlap with his personal and professional interests. He added that he believed the compensation was “respectable” for work that needs significant expertise.

The entrepreneur has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in moral philosophy from Oxford University. He has spent over six years in business development for Microsoft, focusing on cloud computing and AI partnerships.

Amitabh has also written a book on “the side-hustle revolution” as well as a master’s thesis on how AI will impact the nature of achievement. He admitted that one needs to have “immense attention to detail” and often “look out for mistakes” that a human or a machine might make while training AI models.

He conceded that the job is “intellectually quite demanding,” since the models are constantly learning and improving, which means experts like Amitabh have to increase their own knowledge base and creative thinking skills. 

The 34-year-old considers himself to be somewhere between “a techno-optimist and a techno-realist,” as far as the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs is concerned.

An analysis shared by the World Economic Forum in January forecasts that AI will be a disruptive, but beneficial, force on the global labour market that will lead to nearly 78 million net job gains by 2030.

“It’s also possible that this AI fear collectively empowers us to learn better, upskill ourselves and frame questions differently about ourselves,” Amitabh said, adding, “So I’m not concerned about the (idea of) AI Doom entirely, because I think it does far more good than bad.”