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

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.