Thiel Fellow Sigil Wen launches Underdog, an on-device AI assistant
The invite-only beta runs entirely on users' Macs and Windows PCs using a fine-tuned 27-billion-parameter model.
Self-taught coder and Thiel Fellow Sigil Wen launched an invite-only beta of Underdog on Monday, an AI assistant that runs wholly on users' own devices, TechCrunch reported on Tuesday.
Underdog currently runs on Macs and Windows PCs, with Linux, iPhone and Android versions planned. It is powered by Husky, an inference engine Wen built to run models quickly on a user's own hardware, and encrypts the keys to email and other accounts users authorize it to access.
The assistant uses a 27-billion-parameter reasoning model fine-tuned from Qwen3.8-27B, much smaller than state-of-the-art models hosted in data centres, according to the report.
Wen moved to Silicon Valley at 17 and lived in an AI hacker house with researcher Andrej Karpathy, TechCrunch reported.
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