About

Great North Collective is an open community of researchers, engineers, companies, builders, institutions, and independent contributors working together to advance sovereign AI for North America.

We began with a Canadian focus, but the mission is larger than one border. Canada and the United States share many of the same AI infrastructure challenges, open-source needs, research ecosystems, and concerns around data sovereignty, platform dependence, and long-term technical independence.

We believe North America should have strong, open, locally accountable AI systems — models, datasets, tooling, infrastructure, and governance shaped by the people building and using them.

We focus on:

• Open-source models, datasets, and training recipes
• Canadian and American data sovereignty, privacy, and governance realities
• Infrastructure for local, regional, northern, remote, and low-resource environments
• Reducing dependence on closed foreign AI platforms
• Collaboration across universities, startups, governments, labs, companies, and individuals
• Building practical AI systems that can be downloaded, studied, run, fine-tuned, and improved

Get Involved

• Join the organization on Hugging Face
• Star and contribute to our repos
• Share relevant datasets, models, evals, tooling, and infrastructure work
• Help define the technical roadmap, governance model, and community standards
• Bring your own research, experiments, and deployment constraints

We are just getting started. If you are building open AI in Canada, the United States, or for North American users and institutions, this is your home.

Current Focus Areas

• Sovereign foundation models
• High-quality Canadian, American, regional, Indigenous, multilingual, and cultural datasets
• Efficient training and inference for local, northern, remote, and constrained environments
• Evaluation benchmarks that reflect North American contexts
• Open tooling for data curation, training, inference, deployment, and agent infrastructure
• Collaboration between independent builders, academic labs, startups, public institutions, and open-source communities

Contact & Links

• Organization: huggingface.co/GreatNorthCollective
• Discussions: Use the Discussions tab in this repo or any of our project repos