IITM podcast on AI education

A lot of students are being sold artificial intelligence like it is a golden ticket, and IIT Madras is now hosting a podcast built around giving that crowd a reality check instead of another sales pitch. The Wadhwani School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence said the session features Professor B. Ravindran and can be watched live or later as a replay. (x.com) That choice of speaker is not random. Professor Balaraman Ravindran heads the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, the Wadhwani School, the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, and the Centre for Responsible Artificial Intelligence at IIT Madras. (wsai.iitm.ac.in) IIT Madras is not talking about artificial intelligence from the sidelines anymore. Its Wadhwani School was founded in 2024, and the school says it is now home to the 18th and newest department at the institute, with 57 faculty members, 474 publications, 24 industry collaborations, and 25 research projects listed on its site. (wsai.iitm.ac.in) The school is also teaching the subject at multiple levels, which explains why a careers-focused podcast fits the moment. Its official site lists a Bachelor of Technology in Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, a Master of Technology in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, and international programs. (wsai.iitm.ac.in) The Bachelor of Technology program itself is built like a broad toolkit, not a one-button shortcut to a job. IIT Madras says the curriculum combines mathematics, statistics, artificial intelligence foundations, application development, responsible design, and electives across disciplines. (iitm.ac.in) The demand side of the boom is real, which is why so many students are rushing in. Stanford University’s 2025 Artificial Intelligence Index, using Lightcast labor-market data, said job postings mentioning generative artificial intelligence skills rose to more than 66,000 in 2024 from 16,000 in 2023, while postings mentioning large language modeling climbed from 5,000 to 20,000. (lightcast.io) But student demand is running even faster than employer demand. IIT Madras’s online degree platform says its Bachelor of Science in Data Science and Applications is the world’s first four-year Bachelor of Science degree in that field, and reporting on the program said it received 200,446 applications between January 2021 and September 2025. (onlinedegree.iitm.ac.in, careers360.com) Ravindran has been making the same point in other public conversations: the field is older, harder, and wider than the current frenzy suggests. In a 2025 interview and podcast appearances, he traced his own work in reinforcement learning back to 1995 and argued that artificial intelligence now cuts across many disciplines, while warning that a person who uses these tools better can outcompete someone who does not. (wsai.iitm.ac.in, youtube.com, bestplacetobuild.com) So this podcast is really landing in the gap between two stories. One story says artificial intelligence is everywhere; the other says turning that into a career still means surviving math, building systems, learning domain knowledge, and understanding responsible use well enough to be useful in the real world. (iitm.ac.in, wsai.iitm.ac.in, wsai.iitm.ac.in) That is why a “reality check” format makes sense right now. When an institute that launched a new artificial intelligence school in 2024 and already runs degree programs, research centers, and industry links chooses to talk about the boom in education rather than just celebrate it, it is signaling that the rush into artificial intelligence courses has started to outrun clear thinking about what the work actually requires. (wsai.iitm.ac.in, x.com)