LAION

LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network) is a non-profit organization that seeks to make machine learning easier for everyone. By offering datasets, tools and models, LAION hopes to free machine learning research and to open up public education. That's because reusing existing data and models means less work and a lower carbon footprint.

Among the resources LAION offers:

• LAION-400M: An open dataset with 400 million English image-text pairs.
• LAION-5B: A dataset with 5.85 billion multilingual CLIP-filtered image-text pairs.
• Clip H/14: The largest CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) vision transformer model.
• LAION-Aesthetics: A subset of LAION-5B filtered by a model that scores aesthetically pleasing images.

The resources span different dimensions, including image-text pairs, multilingual data and aesthetic filtering. LAION also offers tools like img2dataset, which lets you convert a large collection of image URLs into an image dataset, and Clip Retrieval, which lets you compute CLIP embeddings and build a retrieval system.

By releasing the resources, LAION hopes to help democratize machine learning, letting researchers stand on the shoulders of others and use computing and energy resources more efficiently. LAION is funded by donations and public research grants, so the resources are free for anyone to use.

For more details, you can check the LAION website to see the projects and datasets in more detail. LAION encourages people to report any problems with the datasets through a form, which helps keep the data high quality and accurate.

Published on July 10, 2024