[jpfed]

I'm not even sure where to start, but I have to ask- are there any groups / projects that are trying to make and train an OSS model federated across members' machines?

[alecco]

Several. https://pluralis.ai/ https://nousresearch.com/ https://allenai.org/ and a few more I can't remember right now.

I'm personally on the other end: local small models working well for specific tasks (i.e. "agentic")