LAION - Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network

LAION - Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network

LAION is a 100% non-profit, 100% free organization that provides datasets, tools and models to liberate machine learning research. By promoting open public education and encouraging environmentally friendly use of resources through reusing existing datasets and models, LAION aims to lower barriers to high-quality AI research and development.

Key datasets and models include:

• LAION-400M: An open dataset containing 400 million English image-text pairs.
• LAION-5B: A dataset comprising 5.85 billion multilingual image-text pairs, designed for broad multilingual support.
• Clip H/14: One of the largest CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) vision transformer models.
• LAION-Aesthetics: A subset of LAION-5B filtered by a model trained to score aesthetically pleasing images.
• Re-LAION 5B release (30.08.2024): A refreshed release of the LAION-5B dataset with updated curation.

How it works

LAION provides open access to large-scale image-text datasets and AI models to enable researchers to train and evaluate multimodal models. The resources are intended to be reusable, interoperable, and freely accessible to support transparency and reproducibility in research.

Safety and Ethical Considerations

• As with large public datasets, users should consider licensing, consent, privacy, and potential biases in data when using LAION resources for research or deployment.

Core Features

• 100% non-profit and free access to datasets and models
• Large-scale multilingual image-text datasets (LAION-400M, LAION-5B, etc.)
• CLIP-based vision-language models (e.g., Clip H/14)
• Aesthetic-filtered data subset (LAION-Aesthetics)
• Reuse of existing datasets and models to conserve resources
• Open access to datasets and tools to support research and education
• Transparent governance and licensing to promote reproducibility