In the intelligent era, education is evolving toward personalization, adaptability, and interdisciplinary integration. However, current talent cultivation in colleges and universities is faced with the dilemma of “large quantity but not high quality”, and the reform of cultivation model is constrained by the triple challenges of “breaking barriers, improving quality, and reducing unnecessary competition”, making it difficult to meet the demands for high-quality talents in the intelligent era. As an innovative conception of the underlying cognitive logic, Ω-type thinking is a new cognitive paradigm characterized by integration, openness, and inquiry. It emphasizes realizing systematic knowledge generation through an integrated cognitive architecture, creating interdisciplinary innovation opportunities via open cognitive boundaries, and empowering autonomous development and lifelong growth by an inquiry-based cognitive cycle. The cultivation of Ω-type thinking can be implemented through four operational practical pathways, namely, reshaping the curriculum system with a modular course supermarket as the framework, reconstructing the teaching model via human-machine collaborative metacognitive practice, rebuilding the learning ecology with ubiquitous collaborative creative fields, and reshaping the evaluation system based on dynamically certified literacy development. The cultivation process is highly consistent with the logic of high-quality talent cultivation, and it is the core starting point for improving the quality and efficiency of talent cultivation. The introduction of Ω-type thinking and the exploration of its cultivation pathways can provide cognitive support and practical solutions for higher education to achieve the leap from “quantity” to “quality” in talent cultivation, promote the virtuous cycle of education, science and technology, and talents, and lay a consolidated talent foundation for the development of new quality productive forces.

Under the background of the increasingly rapid trend of disciplinary integration, cultivating students’ interdisciplinary innovative thinking has become one of the key goals of contemporary education. As a breakthrough technology in the era of artificial intelligence, generative artificial intelligence (AI) presents significant opportunities and challenges for the empowerment of education with technology. Based on this, focused on the interdisciplinary education field, this paper firstly elucidated the basic connotation and classification of interdisciplinary innovative thinking and then summarized four occurrence elements of interdisciplinary innovative thinking of a multidisciplinary knowledge base, fundamental innovative thinking skills, team communication and collaboration, and output orientation. Secondly, the four core functions of generative AI in empowering the cultivation of interdisciplinary innovative thinking were analyzed, which included efficient information retrieval and integration, multi-turn dialogues and role-play, evaluation and feedback, generation and creation. Accordingly, the intrinsic mechanisms of the cultivation of interdisciplinary innovative thinking empowered with generative AI was claried. Finally, from the integrated perspective of teaching, learning and evaluation pre class-in class-post class, and based on the design-oriented production-based learning (DoPBL) model, a teaching model for cultivating interdisciplinary innovative thinking empowered by generative AI was constructed. Through research, this paper was expected to provide theoretical and practical reference for how to cultivate students’ interdisciplinary innovative thinking in the age of AI.