How I Became the Dubai AI Kid: My Journey Learning AI at Age 9

I'm Parikshet More. I'm 11 years old, I live in Dubai, and people call me the "Dubai AI Kid." That description used to feel strange — I didn't set out to become a kid AI educator. It happened because I was curious about something, kept asking questions, and my parents kept encouraging me to share what I found. Here is the full story.

It Started With Fortnite

When I was 9, I was playing Fortnite with my dad. I noticed that when I changed my playstyle — hiding more, being aggressive, building higher — the AI opponents seemed to adapt. I asked my dad: "How does the game know what I'm doing?" He said: "That's AI." I said: "How does AI work?" He could not give me a full answer. So we started finding out together.

The first resource we used was YouTube. Then Khan Academy. Then, when ChatGPT launched, I started using it as a tutor — asking it to explain things, then asking follow-up questions, then testing its explanations against other sources. Within a few months I was spending hours a day studying AI concepts. By the time I was 10, I had built my first image classifier using Google's Teachable Machine.

Golf and AI: The Same Framework

I have played golf since I was 7. I won my first tournament — the Golfrade India Open at Tollygunge Club in Kolkata — at age 9. What golf taught me is a framework that applies to everything: collect data on your performance, identify specific weaknesses, practice the weakest part deliberately, measure improvement, repeat.

When I started learning AI, I recognised the same framework. Study the problem. Design the prompt. Analyse what the AI did wrong. Adjust the prompt. Check if the output improved. Repeat until it works. Golf made AI learning easier because I already understood deliberate practice.

The 1 Million Prompters Certification

In 2023, the UAE government launched 1 Million Prompters — a national programme to train one million people in AI prompt engineering. My dad heard about it and we enrolled together. The programme covers what prompts are, how to structure them for different types of AI tasks, and how to evaluate and refine AI outputs.

I completed the programme and received the certification. At the time I was one of the youngest people in the UAE to do so. The UAE's approach to AI education is genuinely forward-thinking — it is one of the few countries that has made AI literacy a national priority at a government level, funding programmes accessible to kids, adults, and seniors alike.

Dubai: The AI City

Living in Dubai has shaped how I think about AI. The UAE has a dedicated Minister of Artificial Intelligence. Dubai's government services use AI across healthcare, transport, and public safety. The city is genuinely investing in becoming an AI hub — and for a kid interested in AI, it is an extraordinary place to grow up in.

I see AI in use everywhere here: smart traffic signals that adjust to traffic flow, government apps that answer questions in multiple languages instantly, hospitals using AI diagnostic tools. Dubai is not talking about using AI in the future — it is using it now, at scale.

Why I Teach

When I was learning AI at 9, I could not find content that spoke to someone my age. Everything was either for adults — too technical, too assumption-heavy — or too simplified: "AI is like a brain!" without any explanation of how or why. I wanted content that treated kids as intelligent enough to understand real concepts, explained in language that didn't require a computer science degree.

That is what KidsFunLearnClub tries to be. When I write about transformers, or reinforcement learning, or deepfakes, I am writing for the 9-year-old version of me who was looking for exactly this — honest, detailed, real, and written by someone who genuinely finds it fascinating.