LAION
LAION created by a physics and computer science teacher, moderator of a Discord channel with a degree in physics?. Works on a voluntary basis to democratize AI.
“We have a bank account with a bit of money coming into it from a few companies that support us. That’s primarily Hugging Face, but also StabilityAI, although we’re mostly supported not by money but by cloud compute. StabilityAI, for example, has a huge cluster with 4000 or now 5600 GPUs, and there we or our members who are approved by the core team can use preemptable GPUs, for example, what is not being used at the moment and is idle.”[1]
“Then in the spring of 2021, I sat down and just wrote down a huge spaghetti code in a Google Colab and then asked around on Discord who wanted to help me with it. Someone got in touch, who later turned out to be only 15 at the time. And he wrote a tracker, basically a server that manages lots of colabs, each of which gets a small job, extracts a gigabyte, and then uploads the results. At that time, the first version was still using Google Drive.” (Ibid)
“We then did a [blog post about our dataset](https://laion.ai/blog/laion-400-open-dataset/), and after less than an hour, I already had an email from the Hugging Face people wanting to support us. I had then posted on the Discord server that if we had $5,000, we could probably create a billion image-text pairs. Shortly after, someone already agreed to pay that: “If it’s so little, I’ll pay it.” At some point, it turned out that the person had his own startup in text-to-image generation, and later he became the chief engineer of Midjourney.” (Ibid)
“I had already heard about Robin Rombach, who was still a student in Heidelberg at the time and had helped develop latent diffusion models at the CompVis Group. Emad Mostaque, the founder of StabilityAI, told me in May 2022 that he would like to support Robin Rombach with compute time, and that’s how I got in touch with Robin.” (Ibid)
For research vs copyright “There is a Data Mining Law, an EU-wide exception to copyright. It allows non-profit institutions, such as universities, but also associations like ours, whose focus is on research and who make their results publicly available, to download and analyse things that are openly available on the internet.
We are allowed to temporarily store the links, texts, whatever, and when we no longer need them for research, we have to delete them. This law explicitly allows data mining for research, and that is very good.” (Ibid)
