Tanmay Bakshi belongs to a generation that grew up speaking to machines as fluently as to people. Born in India in 2003 and raised in Canada, where his family moved when he was an infant, he sat down at a computer at age five and never really got up. By nine he had published his first app; by twelve he had become the world's youngest IBM Watson developer, building 'Ask Tanmay,' an application that used IBM's cognitive systems to weigh competing answers before responding — and, in the process, surfacing a bug in Watson itself.
What set Bakshi apart was not only precocity but generosity. He turned his self-taught expertise outward, launching the 'Tanmay Teaches' YouTube channel to walk other young coders through artificial intelligence, machine learning, and software development. He authored 'Hello Swift!,' a programming book aimed at beginners, and became an IBM Champion and Honorary Cloud Advisor while still a teenager, speaking on keynote stages about the future of AI.
Bakshi's career is a portrait of the modern prodigy: less the lone genius in a tower than a node in a global network, learning from the open internet and giving back to it at the same speed. He has consistently argued that artificial intelligence should be a tool to augment human ability rather than replace it — a conviction he has spent his young life demonstrating in code.
Achievements
- Became the world's youngest IBM Watson developer at age 12
- Built 'Ask Tanmay', a Watson-powered question-answering application, and identified a bug in IBM Watson
- Published his first software application at age 9
- Author of the programming book 'Hello Swift!'
- Named an IBM Champion and IBM Honorary Cloud Advisor
- Creator of the 'Tanmay Teaches' YouTube channel for young coders
