Sanyukta Deshpande

Research Scientist @Sandisk | PhD @UofIllinois

EconCS, Applied AI, Mechanism Design, Policy

Eternally curious about Tech+Econ+AI.

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) has been used for over a century — and now reaches 52 U.S. jurisdictions and ~14 million voters.

Yet theoretically, it is vulnerable to strategic manipulation. The catch? Showing the strategy space empirically has been computationally difficult.

We designed algorithms to do so and applied them to over 100 real elections. New paper in the Journal of Computational Social Science! (1/9)

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

@aviralbhat Operation Safed Sagar might change your opinion!!

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

@ziv_ravid 🫡🫡

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

This is cute.

[Ravid Shwartz Ziv @ziv_ravid]

A sunny day in Mountain View. Like every other day.

Jeff, Sanjay, Oriol and Quoc walk into a VC office on Sand Hill. The VC is on his second oat latte and has fourteen minutes blocked for this.

Jeff: So. We decided to build our own company.

VC: Okay, great, love that. Who's "we"?

Jeff: The four of us.

VC: ...All of you?

Jeff: Yes.

VC: All four. In one company. Together.

Jeff: That's right.

VC: I'm giving you $100 million right now.

Jeff: We haven't shown you anyth-

VC: You know what, forget it. A billion. One billion dollars.

Sanjay: We prepared a deck.

VC: I don't want the deck.

Jeff: It's only eleven slides.

VC: Two billion.

Oriol: Slide one is the mission.

VC: Three.

Oriol: "Automate machine learning, science and engineer-"

VC: FOUR. Four billion. Stop reading.

Quoc: Should we talk about the market?

VC: If you say the word "market" I will go to five and I have not cleared five with my partners.

Jeff: We were also thinking about being a Public Benefit Corp-

VC: Five.

Jeff: Do you want to hear the technical approach?

VC: Six billion. Please leave. Please leave...

Jeff: Nice to talk with you!

VC: Seven, please go 😥

They leave. It's still sunny. It's always sunny. The deck was never opened.

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

He was!

And I think he’s cool, even if he directed me to SemiAnalysis models to get my market questions answered :P

@dylan522p

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

@dylan522p Are you at FMS?!

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

@dylan522p Are you at FMS?!

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

My three (:P) cents on this:

1. The "only" question will be an aftermath of ensuring all income classes can add "value" to the economy by constantly updating themselves, as needed. The structure of the economy will be an outcome of value creation. Key inputs: R&D, education, and relentless upgradation.

2. A shift toward quality, reliability, and brand need not slow growth, especially if "quality" means building AI-native systems. AI is rewriting the value of writing software, while simultaneously questioning the value of repeatedly spending tokens to reinvent the wheel.

3. Manufacturing still has enormous room to grow! The capex pouring into AI infrastructure is flowing back into the broader economy and exposing higher-margin opportunities.
While extensive automation will mean fewer direct jobs, building that automation is itself where much of the value creation lies.

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

@aditya158081 Went to a nearby Starbucks for a work session, and an Indian guy sitting on the same table got interested in what I was doing.
Connected on LinkedIn then, now he’s CEO of a mid-sized company!
Bay is cool!

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

And yes, “memory” helps here, just like it does in case of human memory. However, the “relate” part is strongly about feel + experience, and has very significant anti-bias on appearing in texts, as it’s too trivial to be written out.

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

So humans can essentially simulate others’ brains via shared experiences in many settings, to better navigate collaboration and communication.
For ex: creating mental models on what context a new person with X experience will have and will need henceforth.

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

As we incorporate AI more, it will be interesting to see if we increasingly expect AI to have higher human understanding capabilities. Or if we will be forced to write out what to “relate” with.

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

This.

[PV Sindhu @Pvsindhu1]

Shivani, I have to say this first… you’re such an incredible writer. ❤️ I genuinely love reading everything you write.

Also… getting Datta to talk this much genuinely feels like an achievement. 😂 He’s usually the one asking all the questions, never answering them.

The recovery experiments at home are all true too. 😭 @deepigoyal got him sold on an inversion table after reading and testing a thesis while building Temple. Another dear friend convinced him that red-light therapy was the answer. Then, one fine morning, a temperature-controlled mattress magically appeared. Tart cherry juice became compulsory before bed. Recovery boots. Breathing drills. Cryotherapy. At this point I don’t even ask questions anymore… I just say, “Okay… what’s today’s experiment?” 😂 His latest obsession is somehow finding a hyperbaric chamber. I made the mistake of looking it up… and it’s literally a giant metal tube. 😭 Strangely enough, a lot of these bizarre things are actually starting to make sense.

As romantic as it sounds that I spend hours watching films with my husband… I should clarify they’re badminton films. 😭 His team cuts footage from the last five years into endless clips, and we sit there watching them over and over again. So no… not exactly The Notebook. 😂

One thing I’ll always be grateful for, though, is Virat bhai. I reached out to him at one of the lowest points of my career. Injuries were piling up, the results weren’t coming, and I just needed someone who understood. He replied within minutes, and we met the very next day.

What we spoke about will always stay between us. But I’ll always be grateful that when I needed someone, he was there. He didn’t say much, but every word stayed with Datta and me. Some conversations change the way you see things. That was one of them. ❤️

The biggest thing I took away was the importance of finding your joy again.

Today, I know exactly why I wake up for those 5:30 a.m. sessions.

And I can honestly say… it isn’t the trophies.

It isn’t the wins. It’s something much deeper.

And this time, I’ll protect it with everything I have. ❤️

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

@khoomeik Wait but why is warmth scaled on opposite direction to rigor?!

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

SemiAnalysis doing MetaAnalysis

[SemiAnalysis @SemiAnalysis_]

On Feb 28th 2026, the United States launched Operation “Epic Fury” against Iran.

Markets and media were caught off guard, but careful and diligent observers were hardly surprised.

The signals sat in plain sight for weeks, you just had to know where to look. A thread on OSINT — and why we run some of our research the same way. (1/10)🧵

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

@alexolegimas What a story!!
Institutions can make economics work and economists put forth this very institutional framework for future.

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

@Tim_Roughgarden @the_IAS Congratulations! 🎉

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

@RuntimeBRT Students are capable of churning out wayyyy more than what society can imagine!

[Sanyukta Deshpande @Sanyukta__D]

@khoomeik As you get moore intelligence, you get moore compute. 😬

[Ronnie Chatterji @RonnieChatterji]

The biggest shift in AI for work may be the move from chat to delegation.

In a new paper, we study how Codex usage evolved over the past year - especially within @OpenAI - as agentic tools became more capable.

We saw an expansion of users and usage in this time.
https://t.co/mjGLDrt7ST

[jessica dai @jessicadai_]

we analyzed >100k posts from r/ChatGPT over 3 years

on one hand, we saw ChatGPT quickly become normalized as an everyday consumer product, which is pretty cool

on the other hand…