Laion
Explore LAION’s free, large-scale AI datasets and models including LAION-5B and CLIP H/14. Support open-source ML research and education with high-quality, reusable image-text data.
About LAION
What Is LAION?
LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing machine learning research through open, freely available datasets and models. With a mission to democratize access to large-scale AI resources, LAION supports both academic research and public education in artificial intelligence.
Open Access Philosophy
Unlike commercial organizations, LAION operates entirely as a non-profit and keeps all of its resources 100% free and open. This ensures that machine learning innovation is not limited by paywalls, proprietary tools, or restricted access—encouraging global collaboration and transparency.
LAION Datasets
LAION-400M
LAION-400M is one of LAION’s foundational datasets, offering 400 million English image-text pairs. This open dataset has been widely used by researchers to train multimodal models like CLIP and other vision-language systems. Its scale and accessibility make it a go-to resource for projects involving image-caption alignment.
LAION-5B
As one of the largest open multimodal datasets in the world, LAION-5B contains approximately 5.85 billion image-text pairs filtered using CLIP models. It supports multilingual research and enables large-scale training of models for tasks like image generation, semantic search, and multimodal understanding.
LAION-Aesthetics
This curated subset of LAION-5B focuses on images filtered by an aesthetic scoring model. It enables the development of models that are more attuned to visual quality and beauty—a useful feature for creative AI applications in art, design, and media.
Tools and Models
CLIP H/14 Vision Transformer
LAION also contributes to model development, including the release of CLIP H/14—the largest CLIP vision transformer model to date. It’s optimized for tasks requiring understanding of both images and text, such as search, classification, and captioning. This model is open-source and available for research and experimentation.
Reusability and Sustainability
One of LAION’s key goals is to reduce resource waste in machine learning. By making pre-existing datasets and trained models freely available, researchers can avoid duplicating expensive training processes—resulting in a more environmentally sustainable AI ecosystem.
Impact and Community
Enabling Global AI Research
LAION’s resources are used by universities, labs, and independent researchers worldwide. Its datasets have contributed to breakthroughs in vision-language models and have served as training foundations for widely adopted systems like Stable Diffusion and OpenCLIP.
Open Science and Education
The organization’s commitment to open science ensures that students, educators, and smaller research teams can access the same tools as top-tier tech companies. This levels the playing field and supports innovation from underrepresented regions and communities in the AI field.
How to Get Involved
Support and Donations
LAION is funded through community support and donations. Contributors help maintain infrastructure, release updates, and develop new tools that benefit the open-source AI ecosystem. Donation opportunities are available through their website.