# Karthick Arun

> Founder of Setu Labs. Passed AWS's Cloud Practitioner exam at 9, now building Lucky, a voice-first AI guide for blind users, alongside AI research and student tools.

Karthick Arun · Founder of Setu Labs. Gilbert, Arizona. Basha High School, Class of 2027.

AWS turned me away from its Cloud Practitioner exam for being too young, so my dad and I emailed Andy Jassy. AWS made an exception, later dropped its age limit, and invited me to re:Invent. After teaching other kids cloud computing over Zoom, I founded Setu Labs to build Lucky, a digital guide dog that reads PDFs, email, and the web aloud.

## Right now
- Founder & CEO, Setu Labs: Building Lucky, a voice AI for blind people, with Foundation Fighting Blindness chapters
- AP Research: AI fraud detection: Fine-tuned a 20B open-weight model that beat GPT-5 on fraud detection across seven domains: 0.78 F1 vs. 0.65, and 16× faster
- President, Basha DevOps Coding Club: Teaching younger students to code, something I started in 2020

## Work
- [Lucky](https://karthick.me/work/lucky): A voice-first digital guide dog that reads PDFs and email aloud for blind and low-vision people.
- [Small models vs. GPT-5 on fraud detection](https://karthick.me/work/fraud-research): Can a fine-tuned open-weight model beat a frontier model at spotting deception? Across seven domains, the smaller one did.
- [SnakeID](https://karthick.me/work/snakeid): Point your phone at a snake and find out whether it's venomous, with safety guidance if it is.
- [Khan Academy MCP](https://karthick.me/work/khan-mcp): An open-source MCP server that lets AI assistants search, browse, and read Khan Academy.
- [Infotruster](https://karthick.me/work/infotruster): A Chrome extension that uses AI to summarize the Terms of Service and privacy policies people skip.
- [Fine-tuning GPT-2 XL on a free GPU](https://karthick.me/work/gpt2-xl): My first fine-tune: teaching a 1.5B-parameter model from 2019 to suggest five synonyms or antonyms for any word.
- [KTutor](https://karthick.me/work/ktutor): An AI tutor that adapts to how each student learns, through video, games, or audio.
- [Library of College](https://karthick.me/work/library-of-college): An evidence bank for college essays: save your stories all year, then let AI find which ones answer each prompt.
- [OpenCitation](https://karthick.me/work/opencitation): A free, open-source citation manager with no ads, no tracking, and no account required.
- [Bills Simplified for Kids](https://karthick.me/work/bills-simplified): Upload a bill from Congress and ask it questions, with answers explained so kids can understand them.
- [TeenTalk](https://karthick.me/work/teentalk): An AI listener for teens: type what's on your mind and get a supportive, spoken response, with crisis resources when it matters.
- [AWS Breaks](https://karthick.me/work/aws-breaks): Brakes for an AWS account: pause every running service to stop the bill, without deleting anything.
- [Kids Cloud Club](https://karthick.me/work/kids-cloud-club): A free online club where I taught other kids cloud computing and AWS over Zoom.
- [AWS Robotics internship](https://karthick.me/work/aws-robotics): A summer with the AWS Robotics team, helping test and program their TurtleBot robots.

## Moments
- [Commended by the U.S. Senate](https://karthick.me/moments/us-senate-commendation), October 18, 2018: Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California commended me as the youngest person to earn the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification.
- [A year after AWS turned me away, I was on its keynote stage](https://karthick.me/moments/aws-public-sector-summit-2019), June 11, 2019: At 10, I was the final speaker at the AWS Public Sector Summit keynote, telling the audience how AWS's age limit had turned me away.
- [From no Spanish to the Spanish Honor Society](https://karthick.me/moments/spanish-honor-society), 2025 to 2026: I started Spanish 1 knowing none of it. By junior year, I was a student representative in Basha's Spanish Honor Society.

## Pages
- [Story](https://karthick.me/story): How Karthick Arun went from being turned away from an AWS exam at 9 to building Lucky for blind and low-vision people.
- [Work](https://karthick.me/work): What I’ve founded, researched, and shipped. Each project has its own page: why I started it, what I did, and how far it’s gotten.
- [Next](https://karthick.me/next): What I want to build and learn during the Academy year.
- [Full text](https://karthick.me/llms-full.txt): everything on this site as one Markdown file

## Press
- [NBC4 Washington: Meet the 10-Year-Old Helping Amazon Web Services's Robotics Team](https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/meet-the-10-year-old-amazon-cloud-expert/153863/), June 12, 2019. NBC4 covered how AWS turned me away at 9, then dropped its age limit so I could take the Cloud Practitioner exam, and the AWS summer robotics program it led to.

## Links
- Site: https://karthick.me
- GitHub: https://github.com/aicoder2009
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthickarun