13-year-old Indian AI developer on mission to train 100,000 coders

A 13-year-old teenager of Indian origin, who also happens to the youngest IBM Watson Developer and a neural network architect, has made it his mission to reach 100,000 aspiring coders to help them innovate and learn along with their journey of coding.

The kid genius in question, Tanmay Bakshi, also urged the youth to be equipped with coding and algorithm skills to operate Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies that already occupy a big part of our modern lives.

Speaking during the first day of the Knowledge Summit in Dubai, the Indian teenager said: “There’s a lack of resources for beginners who want to elevate knowledge of coding to next level of AI and Deep Learning. While knowledge and technology itself are everywhere, the resources to use that technology isn’t, so this gap needs to be filled.”

Bakshi’s family immigrated to Canada from India in 2004, a year after his birth. His father, Puneet Bakshi, is a computer programmer at a trucking company, and also a math and science tutor at night during the weekends. His mother, Sumita, is a housewife. He also has a sister, who studies at university.

He started coding at an early age of five years. By nine years, he had already released his first iOS app in Apple’s App Store. He got into AI at the age of 11 years and developed his first AI project at the age of 12. Bakshi started his own YouTube channel “Tanmay Teaches” six years ago to educate the youth on computing, programming, machine learning, math, science and neuro-network. With over 156,000 subscribers, he has filmed over 150 videos to date.

At the summit, Bakshi said such skills are critical to our future and we are trying to get these skills out for everyone. “With hundreds of data science jobs and neural network architecture available, the appropriate training and skills are required to fill these vacancies,” Bakshi, the author of a textbook on the programming language ‘Swift’, was quoted as saying by media reports.

The teenager, based in Canada, is a coach at the Fourth Industrial Revolution Organization whose goal is to teach youth specific skills identified by Institute of the future for effective participation in future workplaces. So far, he has reached 5,200 young aspiring coders.

When asked how he feels about AI taking over the world, Bakshi said the technology is not being developed to replace humans, but instead it’s been and is being, developed to augment our lives and amplify our skills.

“Artificial intelligence was developed and is continuing to be developed for the sole purpose of augmenting our lives, and amplifying our skills or capabilities in what we do every day,” he was quoted as saying by media reports.

“AI will never overpower humans due to its ability to make naïve mistakes that humans cannot make. Since AI isn’t biological and doesn’t have hundreds of trillions of connections that humans have, it doesn’t own enough abstract or deep enough thinking to replace humans,” noted Bakshi.

Bakshi is currently working on a book about simple beginning to Deep Learning with IBM Watson. His upcoming AI projects include facial recognition systems for security, a crisis-detecting system in businesses and developing cognitive technologies to help communication among people with special needs.

When most of us were making our way through first grade, Tanmay Bakshi was a programming prodigy.

His love affair with computer programming started out as fun and games at the tender age of five. “Computers just fascinated me with how they could do anything. They were like magic,” Bakshi told Quartz in an interview. “Just seeing my name on the screen or just seeing the color of the screen change, it was really fascinating. I wanted to know what went behind it and how it actually worked.”

“At five, everything was like a toy for me. I didn’t know that people did programming as a job, that people were paid to do this,” he said. “My dad [also a programmer by profession] was able to see that curiosity and was able to help me nurture that passion,” Bakshi said. His initial rendezvous with programming included experimenting with simple languages like FoxPro, Bash, and VB (Visual Basic).

After Bakshi forayed into the world of programming, there was no stopping him. He designed his first major application when he was eight. By age nine, when most of us were still learning basic arithmetic, he had released his first iOS app, called ‘tTables,’ that helped kids learn multiplication tables. At 12, Bakshi became IBM Watson’s youngest programmer, even detecting a bug in the system. (Since then, IBM has invited Bakshi to conduct a main-stage session at its annual conference, and he continues to work under mentors at the company.)

Now, the 13-year-old is also an author and a teacher.

In 2011, Bakshi launched YouTube videos—Tanmay Teaches—designed to teach budding coders the tricks of the trade. “I started it with a goal, which was to help and reach out to 100,000 aspiring coders and beginners to help them along their journey of learning programming,” said Bakshi. “I’ve reached around the 3,900 mark there.” He has also authored a book titled “Hello Swift,” a beginners’ guide for iOS app developers.

With his packed schedule, the one thing the Ontario, Canada, resident doesn’t have time for is going to a traditional school. For the past two and a half years, Bakshi has been homeschooled. When he’s not coding, creating YouTube tutorials, or serving as a keynote speaker for the likes of Apple, Walmart, IBM—and soon, India’s IT industry association NASSCOM—he enjoys biking and playing table tennis.

These days, Bakshi is working on a project, “The Cognitive Story,” that is trying to help a quadriplegic woman communicate. “When she was seven, she could communicate properly. Now she’s twenty-nine and she cannot communicate at all,” Bakshi said about “Boo,” who is named after the only sound she can make. “Now we’re really trying to see how we can use the cognitive tech to augment her ability to communicate with the outside world.” Bakshi’s role in the project is to use cognitive computing, deep neural networks, and artificial intelligence technology to decipher EEG brain waves in order to try and understand what she’s saying.

Below are a few more glimpses into Bakshi’s life from his conversation with Quartz.

Who is your role model?

Steve Jobs, because of how he was so passionate about everything he would do, and how he had this perseverance to stay dedicated no matter what.

What advice would you give to aspiring young programmers with big ambitions?

There are three things I’d like to say here: Start small, start easy, and start playing. First of all, you have to be passionate about programming before you can program. You have to not be afraid of errors and you have to just keep trying. Every time you find a solution to an error, you’re never going to face it again. Every time, you do that, you’re just getting better and better at programming. And, of course, every problem has a solution.

If you were not a programmer, what would you be?

I definitely think a teacher. I absolutely love to share my knowledge. Whatever I learnt here, everybody does not need to spend their time and their energy to learn what I’ve already learnt, that I can show them. And really, why reinvent the wheel of knowledge when you already have someone who can share it with you?

What’s one thing on your wish list that you haven’t done yet?

One of the things I always wanted to do is get my book signed by Amitabh Bachchan.