A video (here, here, here, here, here, and here) featuring a boy named Tanmay Bakshi speaking on a talk show is being widely circulated on social media platforms. The claim accompanying the video suggests that at the age of 13, Tanmay Bakshi was recruited by the tech giant Google with a salary of ₹66 lakhs per month. In this article, we fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Tanmay Bakshi, a 13-year-old Indian, has been recruited by Google with a salary of ₹66 lakhs per month.
Fact: Tanmay Bakshi was not recruited by Google at a salary of ₹66 lakh per month at the age of 13. The viral video is old, dating back to 2017, and shows Tanmay Bakshi speaking on a TV show called AM. This viral video was originally posted by AM on their official Facebook page on 19 August 2017. When the video went viral in 2017 with the same claim, Tanmay Bakshi clarified on his X (formerly Twitter) account on 2 September 2017 that he was not working with Google or Facebook. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
This video has been viral with the same claim on social media since 2017 (here, here, here, and here). The boy featured in the viral video is indeed Tanmay Bakshi, an AI prodigy and technological savant. According to Tanmay Bakshi’s LinkedIn profile description, he currently works in collaboration with IBM. He is a software developer, author, speaker, and instructor at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Tokyo. Tanmay is also a popular YouTuber with a significant following of over 300,000 subscribers. He mainly posts tutorials on coding and web development. Prominent international media outlets such as Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNBC, and CBC have featured Tanmay.
When we went through Tanmay Bakshi’s X (formerly Twitter) account, we found that when the same viral video went viral with the same claim in 2017, Tanmay Bakshi clarified (archived link) on his X (formerly Twitter) account on 2 September 2017 that he was not working with Google or Facebook.
The viral posts also mentioned that the video shows an interview conducted by Google. However, the video shows Tanmay Bakshi speaking on a TV talk show called ‘AM’ on a New Zealand-based TV channel in August 2017, where he discussed Artificial Intelligence (AI) and programming in detail. Tanmay also posted (archived link) a link to this TV talk show video on his X (formerly Twitter) account on 24 August 2017. This viral video was originally posted by the ‘AM’ talk show on their official Facebook page on 19 August 2017.
Furthermore, we have contacted Tanmay Bakshi to confirm whether he is currently working for Google or if he was associated with Google at any point after 2017.
To sum it up, Tanmay Bakshi was not recruited by Google at a salary of ₹66 lakhs per month at the age of 13.
