New Delhi: How much can a side gig earn you? Sometimes it can be way above the salary you might earn on a regular job. Shocked? Despite being a successful entrepreneur, Utkarsh Amitabh, an Indian based in the UK, started a side hustle and is now making over Rs 18,000 an hour training artificial intelligence models. Amitabh has earned about Rs 2.6 crore since taking up the gig in January this year, which he finds to be truly interesting to him.
Amitabh, 34, told CNBC Make It that he was not looking for a new job but he accepted this freelance role with data labeling startup micro1 in January 2025 because it piqued his intellectual curiosity.
Who Is Utkarsh Amitabh
Utkarsh Amitabh is the founder-CEO of global mentorship platform Network Capital. He did his mechanical engineering from Delhi College of Engineering and a master’s in moral philosophy from Oxford University. Amitabh worked with Microsoft for six years, focusing on cloud and AI partnerships. He has also published research on the future of achievement in an AI era. With extensive knowledge in AI, he came up with the idea of assisting train enterprise-level AI systems.
Freelance job
Amitabh works about 3.5 hours each night, usually after his one‑year‑old daughter is asleep. His work involves testing models with detailed business problems, identifying where AI gets confused and reframing prompts so the system can learn more accurately. “You need immense attention to detail,” he said. “The machine learns but so do you. And that is what makes it energising,” he told CNBC Make It.
Amitabh revealed that he was not actively hunting for another job when the opportunity came along. What caught his attention was the nature of the work itself. For him, the freelance role was something he could use to further his interests. “This did not 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.
Made Rs 2.6 crore since taking up gig
Since taking up the freelance work in January this year, Amitabh has made nearly Rs 2.6 crore. Even with the sizeable earnings, Amitabh maintains that money was secondary. What was more important was intellectual alignment and fair compensation for skilled work.
Founded in 2022, micro1 is an AI-powered recruitment and job matching platform. Valued at $500 million, micro1 has a network of over two million experts who help refine models for major AI labs and Fortune 100 companies.
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