Mukul Chakravarthi

Product Design @useascend / Design Director @SAAGanthology

[Mukul Chakravarthi @MukulChak]

@jenny_wen It’s less the object itself but the defamiliarized nature of it. Massive dissonance between the object and the context

[Mukul Chakravarthi @MukulChak]

@m0recilantr0 Love the point about slop being the algorithmic interpretation of taste. Really interesting way to define it.

[Mukul Chakravarthi @MukulChak]

@broadglow This was very helpful, thanks! Understanding the technical stakes makes it a compelling problem. Lot of hate I’m sure is completely unwarranted. But like several others, I take issue with the framing of this as a way to build and scale ‘taste which remains a nonsensical gimmick

[Mukul Chakravarthi @MukulChak]

@martinromanuk It’s true, and I do want the team to win. I also think there’s no reason they won’t build a good product, I just think they’re going after the wrong problem.

[Mukul Chakravarthi @MukulChak]

A doomed endeavor in a very specific sense that one, ironically, no one with ‘taste’ really calls their startup taste labs. Two, this betrays a fundamental misconception of a concept that evades definition. Taste, once given shape in any way; formalized or classified, evaporates.

[Thais Castello Branco @thaiscbranco_]

We’re excited to introduce Taste Labs.

Our mission is to end AI slop. We’re building the data and infrastructure layer to give AI models and agents taste.

And today we’re coming out of stealth, announcing our $18.5M seed funding, co-led by @CRV and @AmplifyPartners

AI has nailed objective domains and made it easy to generate anything. But it still feels off. Now, the challenge is judgement. What fits, what feels like you, what’s GREAT. This requires turning a fuzzy, subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We’re starting with design.

There are two sides to cracking this, the foundation model layer and the agent layer:

- We’ve already been working with the top frontier labs to evaluate and improve their models, crafting the right post-training data and RL environments.
- We’ve also been working with app-layer companies to build the context and verification tools for their agents to produce better, more on-brand, more creative outputs.

We want a future where AI feels right.

If you’re passionate about this mission, join us!

[Mukul Chakravarthi @MukulChak]

@guidocallarelli Your second point is very interesting and I do like the ideas of a canonical conception of taste that goes beyond time and social standing. I was approaching taste from a social and material conception, where social class is central to its ephemeral nature.

[Shashi Tharoor @ShashiTharoor]

Deeply shocking to read this official US statement, which contains absolutely no expression of regret or condolence for the loss of innocent Indian lives. How can a “friend” and strategic partner be so deeply insensitive?

Why couldn’t a non-compliant commercial vessel have been stopped using other, non-lethal means? Is it not possible to disable a ship's propulsion or steering without firing missiles targeted to kill civilian crew members?

Practically every merchant ship navigating these crucial waters has Indian crew on board. Are they all considered fair game for US missiles now?

This approach is unacceptable and I hope @DrSJaishankar had said so to @marcorubio.

[Mukul Chakravarthi @MukulChak]

With respect, how is any reasonable person expected to take anything that this admin says seriously? Are people really this credulous?

[Sriram Krishnan @sriramk]

On everyone asking about the events of the last 24 hours 👇

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification.

Let me explain what he found, in simple terms.

Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE's new On-Screen Marking system.

He spent days reading through CBSE's evaluation tenders, scraped all 576 tenders CBSE has issued, and tracked how the rules changed across three versions of the same tender.

The core finding is that the company that won the contract to scan and grade 17 lakh students' answer sheets is Coempt Eduteck.

Coempt used to be called Globarena Technologies. Globarena was the company behind the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster, where software failures led to 3.8 lakh students getting wrong or missing marks, and 23 students died by suicide.

A government committee found systemic failure and negligence. Six months later, Globarena rebranded to Coempt Eduteck.

So a company with that track record won a contract to handle 17 lakh CBSE students. Sarthak's investigation is about how the rules were rewritten to let that happen.

The tender was issued three times.

> First tender, February 2025. It existed, then disappeared from the public GeM portal. Sarthak scraped all 576 CBSE tenders and this one was missing from the archive entirely.

> Second tender, May 2025. Four companies applied including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation. Cancelled.

> Third tender, August 2025. Coempt won. Between the second and third tender, a series of rule changes happened, and every single one made it easier for Coempt to qualify.

Here is what changed, one by one.

01. The old rules disqualified any company with a history of abandoning work, failing to complete contracts, or financial weakness. The new rules deleted this clause entirely. Coempt's Telangana history stopped being a barrier.

02. The old rules disqualified any company that was "blacklisted earlier." The new rules changed this to "currently blacklisted." Because Globarena rebranded after Telangana, removing the word "earlier" effectively erased their past.

03. The rules required Rs 50 crore average turnover over three years. Coempt's exact average came to Rs 50.86 crore. They cleared the bar by less than 1%. Earlier, a smaller company had asked CBSE to lower the bar to Rs 30 crore for fairer competition. CBSE refused. So the bar was kept high enough to block small players, but sat exactly low enough for Coempt to scrape through.

04. Software maturity is measured on the CMMI scale, 1 to 5. The old rules required Level 5. The new rules dropped it to Level 3. Coempt is a Level 3 company.

05. The cooling-off period for engaging retired CBSE officials was cut from two years to one. This makes it easier to use recently retired insiders to influence the process.

06. The old rules required experience with large projects of at least 5 lakh students each. The new rules removed the student count and counted cumulative answer-book volume across small projects instead. Coempt has many small fragmented university contracts. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS.

07. The old rules required bidders to own their own data centre and disaster recovery centre on Indian soil. The new rules allowed third-party MeitY-empanelled cloud hosting. Coempt runs on AWS and Azure. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS, which owns its own data centres. It also means student data is no longer on sovereign, Indian infrastructure.

08. The old rules required the bidder to own or control the complete source code of its software. The new rules deleted this. Coempt's platform runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS, which they don't own.

09. A last-minute corrigendum, issued right before bid submission, removed CBSE's own power to blacklist the firm if its software failed catastrophically. So even a Telangana-scale failure couldn't get Coempt banned from future government tenders.

10. The penalty structure shifted from punishing mistakes to punishing delays. The old rules fined the vendor for wrong scanning, merged pages, and unscanned books. The new rules dropped those and instead levied Rs 50,000 per day for delays. This incentivises rushed scanning over accurate scanning.

11. The old rules had a hard accuracy threshold, error rate not to exceed 0.5%. The new rules removed this number entirely.

12. The old rules specified proper book and robotics scanners. The new rules just say "sufficient scanners." The definition was vague enough that, as Sarthak notes, the scanning could be done with a phone on a stand.

13. On the security side, the contract required a VAPT (vulnerability and penetration test) certified by CERT-In before go-live, and a restricted beta phase before launch. The system clearly wasn't restricted, because the other researcher, Nisarga, was able to access it and find vulnerabilities four days before go-live. So the mandatory security audit appears to have been bypassed.

These are more than a dozen rule changes, all between the failed tender and the winning tender, all pushing in the same direction, all benefiting the one company with the worst track record in the field.

The security holes Nisarga found last week now have an explanation. The system was built by a vendor that was specifically allowed to skip the security certification, the source code ownership, the data sovereignty, and the quality thresholds the original rules demanded.

Following things need to happen immediately;

1. An immediate CAG audit of the tender process.
2. A parliamentary debate on the topic.
3. An independent investigation into
> Why the first tender vanished?
> Why the disqualification clauses were deleted?
> Why the turnover bar was held exactly where it was?
> Why the security level was dropped?
> Why the blacklisting power was removed at the last moment?

Sarthak, this is genuinely exceptional investigative work. Far better than most journalists with full resources ever manage. Take a bow. :)

[Vishal Ganesan @vjgtweets]

"Two years ago, Nishesh Basavareddy, then 19 years old, left the data science programme at Stanford University to become a tennis professional. That wasn’t a path that children of first-generation Indian immigrants in the United States are known to take.

Despite his outstanding academic record and interest in mathematics, Nishesh thought tennis was his true calling, and his family supported his decision. That call is now paying dividends.

At the French Open on Sunday, the 21-year-old defeated World No. 9 Taylor Fritz 7-6, 7-6, 6-7, 6-1, becoming the first American man to beat a top-10 player at Roland Garros since 2000. This was the first big splash on the international tennis circuit for the Indian-American, currently ranked 148 in the world."

[Mukul Chakravarthi @MukulChak]

If there ever is a till to monetarily ensure this company’s downfall, sign me up. There couldn’t be a more obvious scam out there than VFS. Down with them.

[Apoorva Govind @Appyg99]

I hope they burn this fucking company to the ground. They have the worst dark patterns ever. They won’t let people bring in backpacks (remember, we have to carry 100s of pages of documents) & then turn around and charge $20 to “hold on” to your bag. What a scam

[Jon Wu @jonwu_]

we can all make pinanfarina slop.

we can all take the model trained on a million ferrari photos and make an image that looks like a ferrari.

we can all one-shot a better looking car than what jony ive just came up with.

i get the logic. look here, with close to zero effort i can conjure a thing of objective beauty.

but with even less effort than that, you can simply pull up an old photo of a 250 GTO and say, "this is beautiful."

there's something deeply insidious about LLM "creation":

the danger the luce portends, which i don't see abating anytime soon--is that in the domains in which we cannot create, have no notion of what it takes to create, creation now seems within our grasp.

we have been granted a tool whose output is by definition maximally derivative, yet convinces us we're each an inventor

[based16z @based16z]

It’s the Swatch AP bro. It’s the KIA Ferrari. It’s a collab with Marc Benioff

[Mukul Chakravarthi @MukulChak]

@joshpuckett Honestly, if we’re swimming in these waters, I’d rather take the N Vision 74. The Luce just feels like a category error

[Ishaan Tharoor @ishaantharoor]

Nobody does it better than our Pravda

[ESPN FC @ESPNFC]

ARSENAL'S REACTION TO WINNING THE LEAGUE 🏆

ABSOLUTE SCENES IN NORTH LONDON!

(via @Arsenal)

[Mukul Chakravarthi @MukulChak]

@RobertJBye I’m sure not a single person from Everlane’s founding team wanted this. It’s classic PE deal-making.

[Mukul Chakravarthi @MukulChak]

Public discernment for good prose was always poor but it’s even more damning an indictment that this article simply flew past people’s AI slop detectors. Y’all just got played

[Smita Barooah @smitabarooah]

The quiet grief of adult friendship: One of the most beautiful articles I've read in a while. Hits hard
https://t.co/qXi6UBaTs3

[Fons Mans @FonsMans]

Everyone’s a designer,
until they have to print something.

[New Delhi Review of Books @newdelhireview]

The New Delhi Review of Books, India’s monthly on books, is now live and commissioning pieces for the July issue!