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Thiel Fellow Sigil Wen Launches Underdog, an On-Device AI Assistant Built for Privacy
Sigil Wen, a self-taught coder turned Thiel Fellow, has opened an invite-only beta of Underdog, a free AI assistant that runs entirely on a user's own hardware. It is available now on Macs and Windows PCs, with Linux, iPhone and Android versions planned.
Underdog runs wholly on-device, meaning user data stays on hardware the person already owns rather than traveling to remote servers. The assistant is free to use and is being positioned around privacy as its central feature.
The software is powered by Husky, an inference engine Wen built to run AI models quickly on a user's own machine. According to Wen, it moves less data between a computer's main chip and its graphics chip than competing on-device engines.
Current support covers Macs and Windows PCs. Versions for Linux, iPhone and Android are described as coming soon.
Wen's path to the launch began at 17, when he moved to Silicon Valley and lived in an AI hacker house alongside researcher Andrej Karpathy. There he coded with people who later became prominent in the field, including Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas and OpenAI researcher Noam Brown.
During that period he tested early builds of tools that went on to become widely known, among them a chatbot shared by Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann that became Claude, an image generator from David Holz that became Midjourney, and the systems that became OpenAI's GPT-3 and the image generator Stable Diffusion. He also once got GPT-2 running on an Apple Watch for fun.
Wen is now a Thiel Fellow, a program run by investor Peter Thiel that invites young founders to pursue projects instead of attending college. The Underdog beta opened on Monday and is invite-only.