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Photographer: Maria Feck/Bloomberg Technology AI The Future of AI Relies on a High School Teacher's Free Database With over five billion images, LAION has become central to the future of artificial intelligence -- and a growing debate over how to regulate it. By Marissa Newman and Aggi Cantrill +Follow April 24, 2023, 3:00 AM UTC Share this article Copied Gift this article Subscriber Benefit Bloomberg subscribers can gift up to 5 articles a month for anyone to read, even non-subscribers! Learn more Subscribe Sign In 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. Share Terms of Service Trademarks Privacy Policy (c)2023 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved Careers Made in NYC Advertise Ad Choices Help PxPixel