Silicon Valley’s AI wunderkind launches Underdog, the most private Instinct/Muse competitor yet
Thiel Fellow Sigil Wen has launched Underdog, a privacy-focused AI assistant that runs entirely on-device. The tool utilizes a custom inference engine called Husky to maintain user data privacy while performing reasoning tasks.
Why it matters
As AI adoption grows, on-device processing represents a significant shift toward data sovereignty and reduced reliance on cloud-based data centers.
When self-taught coder Sigil Wen was 17, he moved to Silicon Valley and lived in an AI hacker house with famed AI researcher Andrej Karpathy.
While there, he hacked and coded alongside other people who would become the biggest names in AI, like Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas and OpenAI researcher Noam Brown. He tested early versions of AI tools that would later become well known, including a chatbot shared by Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann that would become Claude, an image generator from David Holz that would become Midjourney, and what would become OpenAI’s GPT-3 and the image generator Stable Diffusion. Prominent investor and entrepreneur Naval Ravikant hired him for Airchat, Ravikant’s now-defunct rival to the Clubhouse social network.
For fun, he figured out how to get GPT-2 running on his Apple Watch. “It was a magical time,” Wen told TechCrunch.
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