LAION

Billions of images, openly shared.

LAION collected billions of images from the internet and made them available as an open dataset. Not behind a paywall. Not in the hands of one company. Open.

This happened because researchers saw that large datasets were only in the hands of companies with big money. OpenAI had them. Google had them. A student in a small country with no budget couldn't experiment.

This created LAION. A non-profit effort to open data. The result is that thousands of researchers worldwide can now work with the same tools as billion-dollar companies.

This is DIP in technology. Not to be altruistic. But because more people can innovate if more people can experiment.

The paradox is that this open-data work probably generated more value than many private datasets. By keeping the barrier as low as possible, it summoned the most talent.

This is inclusivity as strategy. If you want the best ideas to win, you must prevent money from blocking the winning idea. You must prevent talent from poorer countries from being unable to experiment.

LAION is not pure. Like other open-source projects, it's built by people with time and interest. But it's also insight: you win more by being open than by being closed.

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Source: LAION-5B Dataset and open source AI research