LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network) is a German non-profit organization dedicated to democratizing artificial intelligence by providing open-access datasets, tools, and models.
Their mission is to advance machine learning research and promote public education by making extensive AI resources freely available. By reusing existing datasets and models, LAION encourages sustainable and efficient AI development practices.
Among their notable contributions are the LAION-400M and LAION-5B datasets, containing 400 million and 5.85 billion image-text pairs, respectively. These datasets have been instrumental in training advanced AI models, including text-to-image systems like Stable Diffusion and Imagen.
Additionally, LAION offers models such as the CLIP H/14 vision transformer and curated subsets like LAION-Aesthetics, filtered for aesthetically pleasing images.
