a16z backs local AI assistant Underdog: Emails and calendars stay on users’ own computers.

Beating AI Insight News Brief: Conway Research has launched a personal AI assistant called Underdog, raising funding from investors including a16z and Khosla Ventures. The tool currently runs natively on Mac, connecting to users’ emails and calendars to assist with tasks like searching messages, organizing schedules, and handling daily work. The model operates locally, so personal data does not need to be processed by cloud-based AI, and it functions even without an internet connection. a16z has confirmed leading Conway Research’s seed round. Underdog’s ability to run on standard Macs stems from two key factors: its publicly available Woof model has only 4 billion parameters, with 4-bit weights taking up roughly 2.37GB, and the team developed the Husky inference engine, optimized specifically for Woof and Apple Silicon. The team tested the setup on an M5 Max, finding the same model outperformed MLX across 16 tasks, with a maximum speedup of 4.5 times. Founder Sigil Wen notes that daily tasks like searching emails, organizing files, and scheduling do not require calling the most powerful data center-hosted model every time. Small models, as long as they are sufficiently capable and fast, can handle a large number of tasks directly on users’ own devices. Underdog is next set to expand to iPhone, Windows, Linux, Android, and NVIDIA devices. Wen refers to this roadmap as “Underdog’s Law”: cutting-edge AI that today requires data centers to run will likely be accessible on personal devices in approximately six months. The team is also exploring use cases where agents can directly shop on users’ behalf, aiming to eventually build local AI into personal agents that retain long-term personal context and act directly on users’ behalf.