A High School Teacher’s Free Image Database Powers AI Unicorns

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 ...