Silicon Valley's AI Wunderkind Launches Privacy-Focused Assistant 'Underdog'
Sigil Wen, a self-taught coder and former Thiel Fellow, has launched an invite-only beta of Underdog, a privacy-focused AI assistant. Unlike most competitors like Instinct or Muse, the model runs entirely on-device across Macs and Windows PCs with mobile versions coming soon. The app uses encryption for user data access keys and avoids collecting personal information to train models or sell to third parties. Underdog leverages smaller but efficient 27-billion parameter AI models fine-tuned from Qwen3.8, which Wen claims perform comparably to older large-scale models like Claude Opus in certain benchmarks. The startup plans a freemium model with no ads and monetizes via small transaction fees on payments processed through Stripe's secure payment rails. The company behind Underdog is Conway Research, backed by investors including Patrick Collison of Stripe and Andreessen Horowitz. Wen emphasizes that the product aligns user interests like traditional financial institutions rather than data-driven ad models common in AI assistants.
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Topics: AI assistants on-device AI privacy startups