Ask HN: Are distributed, remote research labs are possible now?

I'm an early career researcher in a fairly large research group, and I've always been involved in collaborations of some sort or the other that are remote over the past few years. But recently with COVID and the other issues happening, I've noticed a lot more potential collaborators are open to working remotely on projects. I reach out to well-known researchers at University and even in Industry, and it anecdotally seems like more people are down to work on projects with distributed teams. Is anyone else seeing this too?

I'm sort of thinking about starting a formal collaboration that is entirely remote and ongoing. I’ve been discussing with lots of my colleagues and friends across research and engineering, and it feels like there is so many low hanging fruit in bridging the gap between research and application in different ML topics like Meta-Learning.

Do you think there is an opportunity for a distributed research organization to build practical useful ML tools? I know many researchers in a cluster of related research areas that are interested but I'm not sure what the best path forward is. A flexible, online research collaboration seems reasonable.