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Sigil Wen, a Thiel Fellow who grew up in Silicon Valley's AI circles, launched Underdog, an AI assistant that runs entirely on your computer rather than in the cloud. The product makes money from transaction fees on payments the AI helps you make, not from selling your data or showing ads.
- Underdog runs a 27-billion parameter model locally on Mac and Windows (with Linux, iPhone, Android coming soon), keeping all user data on-device and encrypted, with no cloud servers involved.
- Wen claims the smaller on-device model performs comparably to Claude Opus from six months ago on benchmarks and handles everyday tasks like research and homework questions without needing state-of-the-art capabilities.
- The business model takes a small percentage of payment transactions processed through Stripe instead of charging subscriptions or mining user data, aligning the company's incentives with user privacy rather than data extraction.