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. 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  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. LAION does not host the content of scraped images themselves; rather, the dataset contains URLs pointing to images, which researchers must download themselves. 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. 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. Imagen, a text-to-image model announced by Google Brain in 2022, was trained on LAION-400M in combination with private internal datasets. A successor of more than 5 billion pairs, LAION-5B, was released in March 2022. As of its release, it was the largest freely available dataset of image-caption pairs in existence. 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. OpenAssistant 

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. The project is backed by a worldwide crowdsourcing effort involving over 13,500 volunteers who have created 600k human-generated data points. References 

Applications of artificial intelligence
Open-source artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence laboratories
Non-profit organisations based in Germany