Conway Research opens invite-only beta of 'Underdog', a PC AI assistant that keeps data on-device (report)
Announced October 6, 2026
What happened
Conway Research, founded by Sigil Wen, released an invite-only beta of 'Underdog', an AI assistant that runs only on the device. It supports Mac and Windows and uses the company's own inference engine, 'Husky'. The model is a 27B reasoning model fine-tuned from Qwen3.8 27B.
Provider claims
The company claimed Husky speeds things up by reducing data movement between CPU and GPU, and that the model produced results comparable to Claude Opus 4.6 on some benchmarks. The specific benchmarks are not included in the source material.
Why it matters
Efforts to build cloud-free personal assistants using fine-tuned open models and in-house engines continue.
Confidence medium · official source pending
Sources
- Press AI 비서 '언더독' 베타 공개…데이터 외부 전송 없이 PC에서 실행 ZDNet Korea