LAION

Last updated
LAION
Type Non-profit
Industry Artificial intelligence
Founder
  • Christoph Schuhmann
  • Jenia Jitsev
  • Richard Vencu
  • Robert Kaczmarczyk
  • Theo Coombes
  • Mehdi Cherti
  • Aarush Katta
  • Jan Ebert
Website laion.ai   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

LAION (acronym for Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network) is a German non-profit which makes open-sourced artificial intelligence models and datasets. [1] It is best known for releasing a number of large datasets of images and captions scraped from the web which have been used to train a number of high-profile text-to-image models, including Stable Diffusion and Imagen. [2] [3]

Contents

In February 2023, LAION was named in the Getty Images lawsuit against Stable Diffusion as a non-party. [4] In April 2023, LAION was directly sued by a German photographer who wanted to have his images removed from the training set. [5]

On April 15, 2023, LAION and contributors released to public an open source AI assistant chatbot OpenAssistant.

Image datasets

LAION has publicly released a number of large datasets of image-caption pairs which have been widely used by AI researchers. The data is derived from the Common Crawl, a dataset of scraped web pages. The developers searched the crawled html for <img> tags and treated their alt attributes as captions. They used CLIP to identify and discard images whose content did not appear to match their captions. [6] LAION does not host the content of scraped images themselves; rather, the dataset contains URLs pointing to images, which researchers must download themselves. [7]

The first such dataset, LAION-400M, was released in August 2021 and consisted of 400 million image-caption pairs. The pairs were extracted from a random subset of webpages scraped by Common Crawl between 2014 and 2021. [8] It was an attempt to recreate the process used by OpenAI to collect the 400 million image-caption pairs they used to train the CLIP model - the company had chosen to open-source the model's code and weights, but not its training dataset. [6] Imagen, a text-to-image model announced by Google Brain in 2022, was trained on LAION-400M in combination with private internal datasets. [9]

A successor of more than 5 billion pairs, LAION-5B, was released in March 2022. [10] As of its release, it was the largest freely available dataset of image-caption pairs in existence. [6] Its creation was funded by Doodlebot, Hugging Face and Stability AI, the AI company behind the funding of the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model, which was trained on it. [11]

Criticism

Several studies show that the images in LAION-5B contain problematic images and text pairs of rape, pornography, malign stereotypes, racist and ethnic slurs, and other extremely problematic content. [12] [13]

An investigation by Bayerischer Rundfunk showed that LAION's datasets, hosted on Hugging Face, contain large amounts of private and sensitive data. [14]

In December 2023, the Stanford Internet Observatory released a report on LAION-5B that found 3,226 suspected instances of links to child sexual abuse material with 1,008 of these being externally validated. In response, LAION temporarily removed LAION-5B and LAION-400M citing its "zero tolerance policy for illegal content" and "an abundance of caution". [15]

OpenAssistant

OpenAssistant
Developer(s) LAION and contributors
Initial release15 April 2023;8 months ago (2023-04-15)
Type
License Apache License 2.0
Website open-assistant.io

OpenAssistant is an artificial intelligence (AI) open source chat-based assistant that understands tasks, can interact with third-party systems and retrieve information dynamically to do so. The project is developed by a group of volunteers in collaboration with LAION. One of the goals for development includes free access to large language models that can be run locally on consumer hardware. [16] [17] The project is backed by a worldwide crowdsourcing effort involving over 13,500 volunteers who have created 600k human-generated data points. [17] [18]

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Artificial intelligence art</span> Machine application of knowledge of human aesthetic expressions

Artificial intelligence art is any visual artwork created through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) programs.

80 Million Tiny Images is a dataset intended for training machine learning systems. It contains 79,302,017 32×32 pixel color images, scaled down from images extracted from the World Wide Web in 2008 using automated web search queries on a set of 75,062 non-abstract nouns derived from WordNet. The words in the search terms were then used as labels for the images. The researchers used seven web search resources for this purpose: Altavista, Ask.com, Flickr, Cydral, Google, Picsearch and Webshots.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">GPT-2</span> 2019 text-generating language model

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">DALL-E</span> Image-generating deep-learning model

DALL·E, DALL·E 2, and DALL·E 3 are text-to-image models developed by OpenAI using deep learning methodologies to generate digital images from natural language descriptions, called "prompts".

Wu Dao is a multimodal artificial intelligence developed by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI). Wu Dao 1.0 was first announced on January 11, 2021; an improved version, Wu Dao 2.0, was announced on May 31. It has been compared to GPT-3, and is built on a similar architecture; in comparison, GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters — variables and inputs within the machine learning model — while Wu Dao has 1.75 trillion parameters. Wu Dao was trained on 4.9 terabytes of images and texts, while GPT-3 was trained on 45 terabytes of text data. Yet, a growing body of work highlights the importance of increasing both data and parameters. The chairman of BAAI said that Wu Dao was an attempt to "create the biggest, most powerful AI model possible"; although direct comparisons between models based on parameter count do not directly correlate to quality. Wu Dao 2.0, was called "the biggest language A.I. system yet". It was interpreted by commenters as an attempt to "compete with the United States".. Notably, the type of architecture used for Wu Dao 2.0 is a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model, unlike GPT-3, which is a "dense" model: while MoE models require much less computational power to train than dense models with the same numbers of parameters, trillion-parameter MoE models have shown comparable performance to models that are hundreds of times smaller.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stable Diffusion</span> Image-generating machine learning model

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References

  1. "About". LAION.ai. Retrieved 26 September 2022.
  2. Edwards, Benj (15 September 2022). "Have AI image generators assimilated your art? New tool lets you check". Ars Technica.
  3. Newman, Marissa; Cantrill, Aggi (24 April 2023). "The Future of AI Relies on a High School Teacher's Free Database". Bloomberg News . Retrieved 24 April 2023.
  4. "Getty Images (US), Inc. v. Stability AI, Inc., 1:23-cv-00135". CourtListener. Retrieved 2023-02-08.
  5. "A Photographer Tried to Get His Photos Removed from an AI Dataset. He Got an Invoice Instead". Vice. Retrieved 2023-05-04.
  6. 1 2 3 Alford, Anthony (17 May 2022). "LAION Releases Five Billion Image-Text Pair Dataset LAION-5B". InfoQ.
  7. Edwards, Benj (21 September 2022). "Artist finds private medical record photos in popular AI training data set". Ars Technica.
  8. Schuhmann, Christoph (8 August 2021). "LAION-400-Million Open Dataset". LAION blog. Retrieved 26 September 2022.
  9. Saharia, Chitwan; Chan, William; Saxena, Saurabh; Li, Lala; Whang, Jay; Denton, Emily; Kamyar Seyed Ghasemipour, Seyed; Karagol Ayan, Burcu; Sara Mahdavi, S.; Gontijo Lopes, Rapha; Salimans, Tim; Ho, Jonathan; J Fleet, David; Norouzi, Mohammad (23 May 2022). "Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding". arXiv: 2205.11487 [cs.CV].
  10. Beaumont, Romain (3 March 2022). "LAION-5B: A New Era of Open Large-Scale Multi-Modal Datasets". LAION blog.
  11. Wiggers, Kyle (12 August 2022). "This startup is setting a DALL-E 2-like AI free, consequences be damned". TechCrunch.
  12. Birhane, Abeba; Prabhu, Vinay Uday; Kahembwe, Emmanuel (2021). "Multimodal datasets: misogyny, pornography, and malignant stereotypes". doi:10.48550/ARXIV.2110.01963.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  13. Birhane, Abeba; Prabhu, Vinay; Han, Sang; Boddeti, Vishnu Naresh; Luccioni, Alexandra Sasha (2023-11-06), Into the LAIONs Den: Investigating Hate in Multimodal Datasets, doi:10.48550/arXiv.2311.03449 , retrieved 2023-12-21
  14. Brunner, Katharina; Harlan, Elisa. "We Are All Raw Material for AI". Bayerischer Rundfunk.
  15. Cole, Samantha (20 December 2023). "Largest Dataset Powering AI Images Removed After Discovery of Child Sexual Abuse Material". 404 Media. Retrieved 22 December 2023.
  16. Open-Assistant, LAION AI, 2023-03-09, retrieved 2023-03-09
  17. 1 2 Köpf, Andreas; Kilcher, Yannic; von Rütte, Dimitri; Anagnostidis, Sotiris; Tam, Zhi-Rui; Stevens, Keith; Barhoum, Abdullah; Duc, Nguyen Minh; Stanley, Oliver; Nagyfi, Richárd; ES, Shahul; Suri, Sameer; Glushkov, David; Dantuluri, Arnav; Maguire, Andrew (2023-04-14). "OpenAssistant Conversations -- Democratizing Large Language Model Alignment". arXiv: 2304.07327 [cs.CL].
  18. "Open Assistant: Explore the Possibilities of Open and Collaborative Chatbot Development". KDnuggets. Retrieved 2023-05-05.