Оксана СтепураAI Eng
7 October 2026, 14:04
2026-10-07
Startup Conway Research launches private AI assistant Underdog. Instead of subscriptions, the company will earn from user transactions
Developer Sigil Wen has launched a closed beta version of Underdog, a personal AI assistant. It runs entirely on the user's device, so the startup doesn't have to pay for every request to cloud models. The app will be free and ad-free at launch, and the startup plans to earn money from a small commission on purchases made by the assistant through the Stripe payment platform.
Developer Sigil Wen has launched a closed beta version of Underdog, a personal AI assistant. It runs entirely on the user's device, so the startup doesn't have to pay for every request to cloud models. The app will be free and ad-free at launch, and the startup plans to earn money from a small commission on purchases made by the assistant through the Stripe payment platform.
Underdog is currently available for Mac and Windows. The developer promises to release versions for Linux, iPhone, and Android later.
The assistant is powered by Husky, an AI engine that Wen developed himself for running AI models on his own PC. Husky, he says, transfers less data between the computer's CPU and GPU than other similar solutions, which should speed up local models.
Underdog currently uses a 27 billion parameter reasoning model trained on Qwen3.8-27B. It is significantly smaller than models like Claude, Gemini, and GPT, which typically run in large data centers.
However, Wen claims that the model can already cope well with most everyday tasks. For example, searching for products or helping with math. In some benchmarks, the developer compares its results with Claude Opus 4.6.
The model’s creator, Wen, entered the AI community as a teenager. At 17, the self-taught programmer moved to Silicon Valley and lived in an AI hackerhouse with Andrei Karpati. There, he crossed paths with future Perplexity founders Aravind Srinivas and Noam Brown, and tested early versions of the technologies that would become Claude, Midjourney, GPT-3, and Stable Diffusion.
Wen is currently a participant in the Thiel Fellowship, Peter Thiel's program for young founders who, instead of studying at a university, work on their own projects.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about another AI model for local launch — Muse Glimmer from Meta. It has 30 billion parameters, can run on a PC without a cloud connection, and is focused on the work of local AI agents.
«Чи є у мене талант, якщо комп’ютер може імітувати мене?». Штучний інтелект пише книги авторам Amazon Kindle. The Verge поспілкувався з авторами та виявив багато цікавого
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