Silicon Valley’s AI wunderkind launches Underdog, the most private Instinct/Muse competitor yet

硅谷AI神童推出Underdog，打造迄今为止最注重隐私的Instinct/Muse竞争对手

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.

自学成才的程序员Sigil Wen在17岁时搬到了硅谷，与著名AI研究员Andrej Karpathy住在一间AI黑客屋里。在那里，他与后来成为AI界大咖的人士并肩编程，包括Perplexity创始人Aravind Srinivas和OpenAI研究员Noam Brown。他测试过许多后来广为人知的AI工具的早期版本，例如Anthropic联合创始人Ben Mann分享的聊天机器人（后来演变为Claude）、David Holz开发的图像生成器（后来演变为Midjourney），以及后来成为OpenAI GPT-3和图像生成模型Stable Diffusion的早期原型。知名投资人兼企业家Naval Ravikant曾聘请他参与Airchat项目——那是Ravikant推出的社交网络Clubhouse的竞争对手（现已停运）。出于兴趣，他还曾设法让GPT-2在Apple Watch上运行。“那是一段神奇的时光，”Wen告诉TechCrunch。

Now a Thiel Fellow — the program from investor Peter Thiel that invites young founders to pursue projects instead of college — Wen on Monday launched an invite-only beta of Underdog, one of the most private AI assistants Silicon Valley has yet to offer. The model runs wholly on-device, meaning the user’s data remains on devices they already own, currently Macs and Windows PCs, with Linux, iPhone, and Android versions coming soon. Underdog is powered by Husky, the inference engine Wen built to run AI models quickly on a user’s own hardware. Wen says it moves less data between a computer’s main chip and its graphics chip than rival on-device engines. Underdog has other security features baked in, too, like encrypting the keys to the email and other accounts that users authorize Underdog to access.

作为一名Thiel Fellow（这是投资人Peter Thiel发起的项目，旨在资助年轻创始人投身项目而非继续大学学业），Wen于周一推出了Underdog的邀请制测试版，这是硅谷迄今为止最注重隐私的AI助手之一。该模型完全在设备端运行，这意味着用户的数据保留在他们已有的设备上。目前支持Mac和Windows PC，Linux、iPhone和Android版本也将很快推出。Underdog由Husky驱动，这是Wen构建的推理引擎，旨在让AI模型在用户的硬件上快速运行。Wen表示，与同类设备端引擎相比，它在计算机主芯片和图形芯片之间传输的数据更少。Underdog还内置了其他安全功能，例如对用户授权Underdog访问的电子邮件及其他账户的密钥进行加密。

Underdog is, however, using much smaller models than today’s state-of-the-art ones hosted in data centers. It currently uses a 27-billion parameter reasoning model fine-tuned from Qwen3.8-27B. Wen argues that this model compares favorably with Claude Opus 4.6 in some benchmarks, or what was considered top performance six months ago. He says that means it can handle the everyday tasks that people want an AI assistant to do, like shopping research or answering math homework questions. “You don’t need to sacrifice your privacy for the capability because they’re just as capable,” Wen says. He adds that small on-device models will continue to grow more capable over time.

然而，Underdog使用的模型比当今托管在数据中心的最先进模型要小得多。它目前使用的是一个基于Qwen3.8-27B微调的270亿参数推理模型。Wen认为，该模型在某些基准测试中表现优于Claude Opus 4.6，或者说达到了六个月前的顶尖水平。他表示，这意味着它能够处理人们希望AI助手完成的日常任务，例如购物调研或解答数学作业题。“你不需要为了功能而牺牲隐私，因为它们同样强大，”Wen说道。他补充说，小型设备端模型的能力将随着时间的推移不断增强。

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Underdog is its early business model. The app will be free at first and never ad-supported. Since the AI runs on users’ machines, Underdog doesn’t have the giant overhead of paying a provider for inference. “I don’t have to charge you a subscription to run this because my costs are so super low,” he said. Instead, with Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison as one of his angel investors, he’s borrowing a play from the fintech era. Underdog will take a tiny percentage of payment transactions that the AI assistant makes using Stripe’s secure payment rails, something like an interchange fee. In this way, the AI assistant never has to mine your data. It is as aligned with you as your bank or credit card providers.

Underdog最有趣的地方或许在于其早期的商业模式。该应用初期免费，且永远不会植入广告。由于AI在用户自己的机器上运行，Underdog无需支付高昂的云端推理费用。“我不需要向你收取订阅费来运行它，因为我的成本极低，”他说。相反，在Stripe联合创始人Patrick Collison作为天使投资人的支持下，他借鉴了金融科技时代的玩法：Underdog将从AI助手通过Stripe安全支付渠道完成的交易中抽取极小比例的费用，类似于交换费（interchange fee）。通过这种方式，AI助手无需挖掘你的数据。它与你的利益一致，就像你的银行或信用卡提供商一样。

This runs contrary to the business motivations of many of the other players in AI assistants, whose privacy policies allow them to collect data on users that they may sell to advertisers or other third parties, or use to train other models. That kind of data collection could be a particularly treacherous trade-off for users of an AI assistant, which may need access to the most intimate details about you in order to be useful, from medical conditions to financial data to data on your kids. As Wen wrote in what he calls his AI manifesto, “Why should using AI require surrendering your private information?” He tells TechCrunch: “I honestly want to build Underdog for myself. I’m building a product that I would be proud for my future children to use.”

这与许多其他AI助手厂商的商业动机背道而驰，后者的隐私政策允许它们收集用户数据，并可能将其出售给广告商或其他第三方，或用于训练其他模型。对于AI助手的用户来说，这种数据收集可能是一种极其危险的权衡，因为AI助手为了发挥作用，可能需要访问你最私密的细节，从医疗状况到财务数据，再到关于你孩子的信息。正如Wen在他所谓的“AI宣言”中所写：“为什么使用AI必须以出卖个人隐私为代价？”他告诉TechCrunch：“我真心想为自己打造Underdog。我正在构建一个我为之自豪，并愿意让未来孩子使用的产品。”

The startup behind Underdog is named Conway Research, and Collison isn’t its only big-name investor. Conway is backed by Andreessen Horowitz via partner Chris Dixon, as well as Khosla Ventures, Hummingbird, SV Angel, the Anthology Fund (the partnership fund between Menlo Ventures and Anthropic), and a prominent list of angel investors that includes Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, Noam Brown, and Deedy Das, among others.

Underdog背后的初创公司名为Conway Research，Collison并非其唯一的知名投资人。Conway还获得了Andreessen Horowitz（通过合伙人Chris Dixon）、Khosla Ventures、Hummingbird、SV Angel、Anthology Fund（Menlo Ventures与Anthropic的合伙基金）的支持，以及包括Vercel创始人Guillermo Rauch、Noam Brown和Deedy Das在内的一众知名天使投资人的投资。