Sigil Wen, Karpathy's former hacker-house roommate, launches fully private on-device AI assistant Underdog
alexrodriguesca · x · 2026-10-07
TechCrunch profiles Sigil Wen, a self-taught coder and Thiel Fellow who launched Underdog, a free, fully on-device AI assistant for everyday tasks positioned as the most private competitor to Instinct/Muse.
Wen moved to Silicon Valley at 17, lived in an AI hacker house with Andrej Karpathy, tested early versions of Claude, Midjourney, GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion, was hired by Naval Ravikant for Airchat, and once got GPT-2 running on an Apple Watch. The startup is backed by prominent Silicon Valley investors.
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