Sigil Wen's Underdog Launches Free, Fully Private AI for Consumer Devices

Sigil Wen, a 2025 Thiel Fellow and self-taught coder, has launched Underdog, an on-device AI assistant designed to compete with cloud-based models while keeping all user data local. The application, built by Conway Research—a lab Wen founded in 2026—runs entirely on users' own machines without uploading emails, transcripts, or other sensitive information to servers, addressing privacy concerns that have become central to consumer AI adoption.