LAION

Training a large model usually starts with a data problem, and LAION exists to take some of that weight off.

LAION is a non-profit that publishes open machine learning datasets, tools, and models, so researchers and developers can work with large-scale training data without building a collection from scratch.

The resources are free to access and meant for people training complex models, with an emphasis on collaboration and knowledge sharing.

LAION also promotes environment-friendly practices in how this work is done.

Processing datasets at this scale takes real computational resources, and data quality varies from one dataset to the next, so you will want to inspect and filter what you download.

Some machine learning expertise helps too.

As an open source AI research resource, LAION suits teams comfortable doing that groundwork themselves.