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Ex-17-Year-Old Hacker House Prodigy Launches 'Most Private' AI Assistant, Funded by a16z and Khosla

Self-taught coder Sigil Wen, a Thiel Fellow who once lived in an AI hacker house alongside Andrej Karpathy, launched an invite-only beta of Underdog on Monday through his startup Conway Research. The AI assistant runs entirely on a user's own Mac or Windows PC via Wen's Husky inference engine, using a 27-billion-parameter model fine-tuned from Qwen3.8-27B. Conway is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Hummingbird, SV Angel, the Menlo Ventures-Anthropic Anthology Fund, and angels including Noam Brown and Guillermo Rauch. Linux, iPhone and Android versions are coming.

Source: Ex-17-Year-Old Hacker House Prodigy Launches 'Most Private' AI Assistant, Funded by a16z and Khosla — TechCrunch

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