S Anand

Lyria (Gemini’s new “Create Song” feature) is helping me in new ways. Earlier this week, it created a jingle for my talk. Yesterday I ran an AI Workshop for IAS officers. As part of that, I asked Gemini: Create a soulful vote of thanks (with patriotic Indian music playing in the background) naming each of these people. … and listed each person in the workshop. The song began… (Listen to the song) … with these lyrics: ...

I deliver about 3-5 talks a month and usually prepare for them. Thanks to AI (but even otherwise), I have a steady stream of new content. So, I just to assemble the story. For example, in my TEDx Whitefield talk “Prisoners of Birth”, I shared the impact of name, gender, lineage, place, and time of birth. I didn’t execute any new analysis. I just cherry-picked disparate analyses into a theme. (Took me three days to plan, though.) ...

At Changi Airport, I arrived 2.5 hours early and was worried that the flight was boarding on time - because I wanted to charge my laptop so it would work longer on a 6-hour flight to Delhi. I was also sad that it was only a 6-hour flight Delhi - it won’t be enough to read all my pending reading material. The only time I get to read stuff (instead of vibe-coding) is on a flight, with no WiFi. ...

Tools in Data Science has a remote online exam (ROE). It has a tough reputation. We conducted one today. Here’s how today’s ROE unfolded. The TAs had created 13 questions and shared it with me yesterday. This morning, I tried solving them. At first glance, it looked scarily hard! But I just jumpted down a few questions, and found that five questions were trivial, i.e. I just used the “Ask AI” button to copy the question into ChatGPT and it gave me the answer. ...

I asked ChatGPT to research universities’ AI policies. Here is the report Here are the four lessons I learned from that - about how to use AI for research. 1. Show examples of failures to avoid. Jivraj’s earlier research kept surfacing AI policies universities had researched, not written for themselves!. So I told ChatGPT to: … double-check that they ARE, in fact, about their own use of AI - not policies they’re proposing for others or are researching. ...

I researched the AI policies across 25 universities. In the last 6 months, I conducted sessions at three of these Universities: IIT Madras, Singapore University of Technology and Design, and Ashoka University. Interestingly, these are the three lowest ranked universities in my analysis of AI policies. This is where I’m glad that correlation does not imply causation.

TDS Project 1 wasn’t just a student project. It was a research and social experiment, too. We tested two skills - analytics and design. The design tests were diverse – and students fared worse there. Design may matter more in the AI era, and I’m glad some designs are brilliant. (But not diverse/creative enough.) I also learnt that Gemini beats Midjourney, which beats ChatGPT for image generation. I asked them to contribute to open source. Most PRs were trivial. But five students made a real difference. For example, this PR to Marimo is excellent! ...

I was watching Vaa Vaathiyar which has a short clip of MGR speaking. It’s either AI-generated or mimic-ed and it wasn’t bad. I used ffmpeg to record the audio from the film, transcribed it via Gemini 3 Pro on AI Studio with the prompt: Transcribe this into Tamil … which gave me: ராமு… என்ன செய்திருக்கிறாய் நீ… வாத்தியார் கேட்கிறேன் சொல் நிமிர்ந்து பார்க்க கூட தைரியம் இல்லையா… ஓடாதே… நில்… Translation: Ramu… What have you done… Vaathiyar (MGR) is asking, tell me Don’t you have the courage to stand up and look at me… Don’t run… stop… ...

Terence Tao said, “We haven’t done many experiments … large-scale studies where we take a thousand problems and just test them.” So I told Claude: You know my style. Suggest some innovative experiments I could run. The first suggestion was cool! The Polya Audit. Polya’s How to Solve It lists 20 heuristics (work backwards, induction, analogy, etc.). Mathematicians treat these as wisdom. Nobody has ever measured which ones actually work, and on what problem types. ...

Last Friday, 20 Mar 2026, this “Hack of the Day” was published by The Times of India. My agents generated it entirely automatically. Here’s how that happened. On 12 Feb 2026, I met Rohit Saran, Managing Editor at The Times of India. “Our biggest challenge is the starting challenge. What story to do?” he said. “We waste a lot of time and we starve stories because of this.” What if AI could help with that? We talked for nearly two hours - and left asking: “Should we do just a daily visual newspaper?” ...