March 26, 2025

Vana and Flower Labs Partner to Build the World’s First User-Owned AI Model

Vana and Flower Labs are joining forces to create COLLECTIVE-1 - the world’s first decentralized, user-owned foundation model. An unprecedented step in realizing the future of AI, this revolutionary model will leverage rich, user-contributed data while ensuring individuals retain complete ownership and control over their information.

‍
A New Era for AI: Beyond Web-Scraped Data

Today, most AI models are trained on publicly available internet data, limiting their capabilities. This first-of-its-kind foundation model is a critical next step for AI —one where millions of people safely contribute their private data in a decentralized, privacy-preserving way, cutting across the silos of existing tech companies by leveraging individual data rights.

By combining Vana’s user-owned data network with Flower’s cutting-edge decentralized AI training framework, this model will push AI beyond its current constraints, enhancing cognitive capabilities and expanding real-world applications, while empowering individuals to directly benefit from the data they share.

‍Vana and Flower
‍

Vana: The first open and decentralized network for user-owned data, enabling individuals to contribute, control and collectively monetize their personal data through Vana’s secure compute environment and DataDAO ecosystem which pools unique, high-value datasets and rewards individual data contributors. Today the Vana network includes tens of millions of user-owned data points such as conversational and social message data, health metric data, sleep data, location data and car telemetry data.

Flower Labs: Flower is the world’s most popular open-source framework for federated learning and largest decentralized AI developer community. In particular, Flower Labs has been a pioneer in the training of foundation models using decentralized methods, and were the first to achieve 1B, 3B and 7B sized LLMs trained using GPUs physically located around the world.

What This Unlocks for Builders

‍

This collaboration makes it easier than ever for developers to build AI models with a richer and more diverse dataset than what is available through traditional web scraping methods. As a by-product of the Vana and Flower led effort towards this decentralized foundation model, there will be a growing set of easy to use documented methods and examples that detail how various types of AI can be trained on dataDAO datasets. Builders will be able to tap into this alternative training data that consists of real-world, user-contributed data, creating AI systems that are more personalized, self-sovereign, and advanced. It offers builders access to datasets that would otherwise be trapped behind the walled gardens of a few big tech companies.

Using Vana and Flower Together. Learn more at https://flower.ai/blog/2025-03-19-flower-vana-federated-dao

A Scalable Vision for Decentralized AI

Today, users are already contributing millions of data points through the Vana network that can then be used to train this new decentralized user-owned foundation model, with plans to scale participation 10x by the end of the year. This project is not just an experiment—it’s the first step in a movement toward user-driven AI that gives users direct ownership of the AI they create, rather than just corporations.

‍

“Foundation models concentrate unprecedented economic power in a few AI giants. COLLECTIVE-1 changes this paradigm. This partnership with Flower is a path towards millions of users contributing their data to train an AI model in a federated way, creating a collectively owned AI model with data advantages no single company could match.”'
- Anna Kazlauskas, Creator of Vana & CEO, Open Data Labs

“Decentralized AI training is the key to unlocking AI’s next frontier. Our results show large federated foundation models are feasible, now with Vana we will demonstrate how a distributed, user-owned model can outperform existing alternatives and establish a new SOTA for AI across a number of important domains.”
- Nic Lane, Chief Scientific Officer, Flower Labs

Learn More & Get Involved

Developers eager to participate can start building today by accessing the open-source Flower framework, and specific technical documentation and guidance is available from this blog post here.

More details will be shared at Flower AI Summit 2025, where Anna Kazlauskas will give a talk on the future of data sovereignty and decentralized AI. Flower Labs will also be announcing its latest advances to training LLMs and foundation models using federated and decentralized methods. Together Vana and Flower Labs will be launching this initiative at the Summit, which has grown to become the largest Federated AI conference in the world. Register here to attend March 26/27 either in person, or online.

Recent Announcements
‍

‍

Together, Vana and Flower Labs are pioneering a decentralized AI revolution—one where users are in control, and the future of AI is truly open.

‍