当自学成才的程序员温希尔17岁时，他搬到了硅谷，并在与著名人工智能研究员安德烈·卡尔帕迪一起的AI黑客屋里生活。
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.
在那里，他和其他后来成为人工智能领域顶尖人物的人们一起进行黑客攻击和编程，其中包括Perplexity的创始人阿拉维nd·斯里尼瓦斯和OpenAI的研究员诺姆·布朗。他测试了一些后来变得非常知名的AI工具的早期版本，包括由Anthropic联合创始人本·曼分享的聊天机器人（后来成为Claude）、由大卫·霍尔兹开发的图像生成器（后来成为Midjourney），以及后来成为OpenAI的GPT-3和图像生成器Stable Diffusion的工具。
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.
著名投资人和企业家纳瓦尔·拉维坎特为他在Airchat（拉维坎特的现已关闭的俱乐部之家社交网络竞争对手）工作。
Prominent investor and entrepreneur Naval Ravikant hired him for Airchat, Ravikant’s now-defunct rival to the Clubhouse social network.
为了娱乐，他想出了在Apple Watch上运行GPT-2的方法。“那是一段神奇的时光，”温希尔告诉TechCrunch。
For fun, he figured out how to get GPT-2 running on his Apple Watch. “It was a magical time,” Wen told TechCrunch.
现在，温希尔是一位Thiel Fellow（彼得·泰尔投资人的项目，该项目邀请年轻创始人追求项目而非上大学）。周一，他正式推出了Underdog的邀请制封测版，这是硅谷迄今为止提供的最私密的人工智能助手之一。该模型完全在设备上运行，这意味着用户的数据保留在他们已经拥有的设备上，目前支持Mac和Windows PC，Linux、iPhone和Android版本即将推出。
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.
温希尔开发了Husky——一种推理引擎，即运行人工智能模型的软件，而Husky的设计目标是快速运行。与其他设备上的引擎不同，温希尔表示，Husky在计算机的主芯片和图形芯片之间移动的数据更少。
Wen built Husky, an inference engine, or software that runs AI models, and Husky is designed to run fast. Unlike other on-device engines, Wen says, it moves less data between the computer’s main chip and its graphics chip.
Underdog还内置了其他安全功能，例如加密用户授权Underdog访问的电子邮件和其他账户的密钥。
Underdog has other security features baked in, too, like encrypting the keys to the email and other accounts that users authorize Underdog to access.
然而，Underdog使用的是比目前托管在数据中心的先进模型更小的模型。它目前使用的是基于Qwen3.8 27B微调的270亿参数推理模型。
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认为，这款模型在某些基准测试中与claude opus 4.6相媲美，后者是六个月前被认为是顶尖表现的模型。他说，这意味着它能够处理人们希望人工智能助手完成的日常任务，比如购物研究或解答数学家庭作业问题。
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.
“你不需要为了获得能力而牺牲隐私，因为它们同样 capable，”wen说。他补充说，小型设备上的模型将随着时间的推移变得更加强大。
“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.
或许underdog最有趣的地方在于它的早期商业模式。该应用最初将是免费的，并且永远不会通过广告获得支持。由于人工智能运行在用户的设备上，underdog不需要为推理支付巨大的开销。“我不需要向你收取订阅费来运行这个，因为我的成本非常低，”他说。
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.
相反，他借鉴了金融科技时代的玩法。underdog将从人工智能助手通过stripe的安全支付轨道进行的支付交易中抽取一小部分佣金，类似于 interchange费。这样，人工智能助手就不需要挖掘你的数据。它与你的银行或信用卡提供商一样与你保持一致。
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.
这与许多其他人工智能助手公司的商业动机相反，后者的隐私政策允许他们收集用户数据，并可能出售给广告商或其他第三方，或用于训练其他模型。
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.
对人工智能助手的用户来说，这种数据收集可能是一个特别危险的权衡，因为人工智能助手可能需要访问有关你的最私密信息才能变得有用，从医疗状况到财务数据，再到关于孩子的信息。
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.
正如文在他所称的AI宣言中写道：“为什么使用AI应该要求你放弃你的私人信息呢？”
As Wen wrote in what he calls his AI manifesto, “Why should using AI require surrendering your private information?”
他告诉TechCrunch：“我诚实地想为自己打造Underdog。我正在构建一个产品，我会为我的未来孩子使用它而感到骄傲。”背后的初创公司Conway Research命名为康威研究，而Collison并不是其唯一的知名投资人。康威公司由安德烈森霍洛维茨的合伙人克里斯迪克森支持，还有卡尔斯拉风险投资、汉明鸟、SV Angel、Anthology Fund（Menlo Ventures和Anthropic之间的合伙基金）以及一系列著名天使投资人，包括Vercel创始人吉列莫拉施、诺姆布朗和迪迪达斯等人。
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.”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 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.