Underdog launches invite-only beta of on-device AI assistant
Conway Research says Underdog runs entirely on Macs and Windows PCs, with a 27-billion parameter model and encrypted account keys.
Sigil Wen launched an invite-only beta of Underdog on Monday, an AI assistant that runs entirely on-device on Macs and Windows PCs, according to TechCrunch.
The startup behind Underdog is named Conway Research. The app currently uses a 27-billion parameter reasoning model fine-tuned from Qwen3.8, and it relies on Husky, an inference engine Wen built to move less data between the main chip and the graphics chip.
On the privacy side, Underdog encrypts the keys to email and other accounts users authorize it to access. The company says the app will be free at first and never ad-supported. Underdog plans to take a small percentage of payment transactions made through Stripe's payment rails.
Wen's background predates the launch. At 17 he moved to Silicon Valley and lived in an AI hacker house with Andrej Karpathy, and he tested early versions of tools that became Claude, Midjourney, GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion. Naval Ravikant later hired him for Airchat, and he is now a Thiel Fellow.
Underdog's investors include Andreessen Horowitz via Chris Dixon, Khosla Ventures, Hummingbird, SV Angel, the Anthology Fund, Patrick Collison, Guillermo Rauch, Noam Brown and Deedy Das. In October 2025, Wen said the model compares favorably with Claude Opus 4.6 in some benchmarks, which he described as top performance about six months earlier.
Quick answers
What is Underdog?
It is an AI assistant from Conway Research that runs entirely on-device, currently on Macs and Windows PCs, and is available in an invite-only beta.
How much does Underdog cost?
The app will be free at first and never ad-supported. The company plans to take a small percentage of payment transactions made through Stripe's payment rails.
What model does Underdog use?
It currently uses a 27-billion parameter reasoning model fine-tuned from Qwen3.8 27B.