Indian businessman in UK earns Rs 18,000 an hour training AI models: 'Curiosity drew me in'

Utkarsh Amitabh is the founder-CEO of global mentorship platform Network Capital and has a background in mechanical engineering from Delhi College of Engineering. (Image credit: LinkedIn)

Despite being a successful entrepreneur, an Indian man based in the UK took up a side hustle and has been earning roughly Rs 18,000 an hour training artificial intelligence models. Speaking to CNBC Make It, Utkarsh Amitabh, 34, said he wasn’t looking for another job, but he took up this freelance role with data labeling startup micro1 in January 2025 because it tickled his intellectual curiosity.

Amitabh is the founder-CEO of global mentorship platform Network Capital and has a background in mechanical engineering from Delhi College of Engineering, a master’s in moral philosophy from Oxford University. He spent six years at Microsoft working on cloud and AI partnerships. He has also published research on the future of achievement in an AI era, and thus the idea of helping train enterprise-level AI systems felt “natural" to him, he told the publication.

He works about 3.5 hours each night, typically after putting his one‑year‑old daughter to bed. “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 told CNBC Make It.

Amitabh’s work involves testing models with detailed business problems, identifying where AI gets confused, and reframing prompts so the system can learn more accurately. The process is labour-intensive and can take hours for a single problem set.

“You need immense attention to detail,” he said. “The machine learns, but so do you. And that’s what makes it energising.”

Since taking up the gig in January this year, Amitabh has made nearly Rs 2.6 crore, including completion bonuses. Yet he insists “money was less of a motivator” than the alignment with his research and professional interests. Fair pay, however, remained “a core value.”

Founded in 2022, micro1 has built a network of more than two million experts who help refine models for major AI labs and Fortune 100 companies. The firm, valued at $500 million, says such experts form the “backbone” of data quality as AI models move beyond publicly available knowledge.