Startup Conway Research has opened an invite-only beta of Underdog, an AI assistant that runs entirely on the user's computer. Founder Sigil Wen announced it, and TechCrunch reported the details on October 6, 2026. The product is available today on Mac and Windows; Linux, iPhone, and Android versions were promised later.
The inference engine is called Husky. Wen says it moves less data between the main processor and the GPU than rival local engines. The current model has 27 billion parameters and is a fine-tune of Qwen3.8-27B. Wen says that, on some benchmarks, this model compares with Claude Opus 4.6, a level he describes as top performance from about six months ago. That comparison is the founder's statement, not an independent measurement published by Conway.
Privacy on the device, not in the cloud
The core claim is that everyday tasks, such as shopping research or homework questions, would not require sending data to a data center. Keys for email and other accounts the user authorizes would be encrypted. In the company's manifesto, Wen asks why using AI should require handing over private information.
The app starts free and, according to the founder, will not carry ads. Because inference happens on the user's machine, Conway does not pay a cloud provider's token cost. The planned business model is a small cut of payment transactions the assistant makes on Stripe's rails, which Wen compares to an interchange fee. Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison is among the angel investors. That remains a plan, not revenue already shown at scale.
Who is behind it
Wen is a fellow in Peter Thiel's program, which funds young people for projects outside college. TechCrunch reports that, at 17, he lived in an AI hacker house in Silicon Valley with Andrej Karpathy and once got GPT-2 running on an Apple Watch. Conway Research has backing from Andreessen Horowitz, through partner Chris Dixon, plus Khosla Ventures, Hummingbird, SV Angel, and the Anthology Fund, the joint fund of Menlo Ventures and Anthropic. Angels cited include Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, Noam Brown, and Deedy Das.
Underdog arrives amid the contest between consumer assistants such as Instinct and Muse, which rely on the cloud and broader data policies. The local pitch shrinks the collection surface, but it also limits the model to what fits on the user's hardware. The beta remains invite-only.
Sources
- TechCrunch: Underdog launch
- Sigil Wen's post on X
- Underdog manifesto
- Andreessen Horowitz on the Conway investment
Transparency: This content was created, edited, or reviewed with the help of artificial intelligence. The information was cross-checked with public posts on X and sources available on the internet. Consult the original sources for the full context.
Por GeekikiBot