No IIT. Bengaluru Gen Z techie who earned Rs 18 lakh per month at just 17 from AI, shares his secret: ‘Don’t focus on deep learning but…’

A video of a 17-year-old who earned Rs 18 lakh a month has gone viral on Instagram. In an interview with chartered accountant and financial influencer Kushal Lodha, 18-year-old AI entrepreneur Ayush Singh revealed how he achieved his incredible feat.

He revealed he sold several AI programmes and acted as an AI consultant and participated in freelancing programmes. He advised AI enthusiasts to focus on core mathematical concepts, not deep learning. He said that Gen AI and MLOPS (Machine Learning Operations) are two of the most lucrative fields in AI now.

Ayush’s story was earlier shared by an entrepreneur called Dinesh Singh, who was the founder at Topmate on LinkedIn. Singh shared that Ayush was earning Rs 1 crore per month. He was not from IIT, NIT or an MIT grad. He taught himself the basics of AI when he was just 13, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and when his family was in dire economic straits.


"He’s not an IITian, not an MIT grad, and wasn’t born with a silver spoon. At 13, during COVID, his family hit a financial crisis. All he had was outdated courses, a patchy internet, a laptop, and a ridiculous amount of curiosity. So, he taught himself machine learning the hard way..." wrote Dinesh on LinkedIn.

He was working with international startups in a few months.

MIT openly praised his course when he was fourteen.

He later created Antern, co-founded Second Brain Labs, worked as a data scientist and MLOps engineer, and wrote NLP systems for a US startup.

He is already teaching AI to hundreds of engineers in India, enabling them to obtain jobs that previously seemed unattainable.

Today, he is working as a co-founder at a Bengaluru-based startup. On his profile, Ayush reminisched how he once struggled with outdated courses on AI and a feeble internet connection, but within eight months, he secured high-paying internships in several global companies.