OpenAI Open Model Hackathon

The What

I am participating in the OpenAI Open Model Hackathon (repo hosted here) hosted by DevPost for fun and some hands-on experience with self-hosting an LLM, in this case OpenAI's new gpt-oss model.

My project/ submission/ design is built around the idea of leveraging a local, self-hosted LLM to serve as the central contact point of a voice-activated smart home, inspired by the J.A.R.V.I.S. AI in the early Iron Man movies.

While I have been interested for a while in the home automation space the combination of reliance on external services has been a sticking point.

The space has been notoriously turbulent with multiple vendors and platforms either shutting down or selling to larger organizations attempting to harvest data for their use cases.

To me, this presents an unacceptable trade-off on security, privacy, and supportability.

Self-hosting a LLM as the core of the system adequately addresses these concerns, as I will be able to better control data capture and storage, and as the intended use case has a smaller language domain I believe that any limitations can be addressed through fine tuning.

Paired with MCP enabled IoT devices I believe that a simple automation structure can be built to integrate and automate key features while maintaining data and physical security.