UK-based Indian-origin man earns ₹18,000/hour from AI side gig while juggling multiple roles including writer, lecturer and PhD student, says ‘money was never primary motivation’. Amitabh has earned nearly $300,000 so far since January.(LinkedIn/Utkarsh Amitabh) A 34-year-old Indian man based in the UK earns $200 (about ₹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 pulled him in,” CNBC reported. In an interview with CNBC Make It, Utkarsh Amitabh said he was not looking for new opportunities when data tagging startup micro1 reached out to him in January 2025. At that point he was already juggling several roles – writing books, teaching at a university, the global mentoring platform Network Capital as its founder and CEO, and pursuing a PhD from Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. He was also 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 modeling and technology,” he added. Amitabh has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, a master’s degree in moral philosophy, and spent over six years at Microsoft working on cloud computing and AI partnerships. According to the outlet, his previous work spans a book on side-print economics as well as academic research exploring how artificial intelligence can transform human performance. The opportunity with the AI-based company was a “natural fit” for Amitabh, he said, while also praising the flexible working hours of the job. As a freelancer, he worked an average of about 3.5 hours each night after his 1-year-old daughter went to bed. “It didn’t seem like an add-on, but something I could use to further my interests in a limited number of hours a week,” he said. According to CNBC, Amitabh has earned almost $300,000 so far since January – which also includes bonuses. He said that money was never his primary motivation and he only “considered fair pay as a core value.” He went on to add that he found the compensation to be “respectable” for work requiring considerable expertise. AI and job displacement Amitabh further acknowledged that training AI raises broader concerns about job displacement, but he maintains a balanced perspective. Drawing on projections from the World Economic Forum, he emphasized that while AI may eliminate certain roles, it is also expected to generate millions of new jobs worldwide by 2030. He emphasized that human expertise and machine intelligence are likely to develop together through collaboration rather than competition. “It is also possible that this AI fear empowers us collectively to learn better, upgrade ourselves and ask questions about ourselves differently. So I am not worried about the [idea of] AI Doom completely, because I think it does far more good than bad,” he added.