Conway Research's Sigil Wen on Underdog, the free private AI that lives entirely on your device

Key points

Key takeaways from YouTube interview with Conway Research founder Sigil Wen on launching Underdog (October 2026):

Underdog is live. Underdog, the private personal AI that runs entirely on the user's own devices, opened an invite-only beta that Friday; more than 5,000 tweets requesting invites went out over the weekend.

All devices, no data centres. Conway supports every Apple product with an iOS app about to launch, and is working with Nvidia to ship to Nvidia and Windows machines plus Linux, Android and iOS — bringing the model to your data, not the data to your model, with no database and no data centre.

Underdog's law. Frontier models of today run on your devices in six months: Underdog 27B, post-trained and RL-trained on top of Qwen's 27B, scores better than Claude Opus 4.6 Max per Artificial Analysis despite being a fraction of the size.

Inference optimisation. Conway released Husky, an inference engine around 5x faster, and is tuning extensively for consumer hardware so the spiky on-device models stay near frontier capability.

Free, then the model is the moat. No subscriptions, ads or data harvesting; instead an agent can scan the entire web for the cheapest flight in seconds and generate a unique payment card, reinventing monetisation around the agentic economy.

Agentic-commerce roots. Wen built one of the first AI agents that could earn its own existence and transact, and says Stripe CEO Patrick Collison is his biggest angel investor; he expects the economy to be reformed by reliable, private agents acting for users.

Cloud apps are the target. Users are already unsubscribing from apps like WhisperFlow and Superhuman because on-device alternatives are as good and fully private, while cloud assistants remain prime targets for AI-enabled cyber attacks and open-source mythos-class models spread the capability further.

Read more: YouTube