The future of AI relies on a high school teacher’s free database

Schuhmann, founder of LAION, outside a school in Hamburg, Germany. When high school teacher Schuhmann isn’t teaching physics and computer science to German teens, he works with a small team of volunteers building the world’s biggest free AI training data set – LAION, short for ‘Large-scale AI Open Network’ – which has already been used in text-to-image generators such as Google's Imagen and Stable Diffusion. — Bloomberg

In front of a suburban house on the outskirts of the northern Germany city of Hamburg, a single word – “LAION” – is scrawled in pencil across a mailbox. It’s the only indication that the home belongs to the person behind a massive data gathering effort central to the artificial intelligence boom that has seized the world’s attention.

That person is high school teacher Christoph Schuhmann, and LAION, short for “Large-scale AI Open Network,” is his passion project. When Schuhmann isn’t teaching physics and computer science to German teens, he works with a small team of volunteers building the world’s biggest free AI training data set, which has already been used in text-to-image generators such as Google’s Imagen and Stable Diffusion.