LAION

LAION (acronym for Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network) is a German non-profit which makes open-sourced artificial intelligence models and datasets. 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.

In February 2023, LAION was named in the Getty Images lawsuit against Stable Diffusion as a non-party. In April 2023, LAION was directly sued by a German photographer who wanted to have his images removed from the training set. In September 2024, the Regional Court of Hamburg dismissed the lawsuit, in what was described as a "landmark ruling on TDM [Text and data mining] exceptions for AI training data" in Germany and the EU more generally.

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