It all started originally on lucidrains/dalle-pytorch in the months following the release of DALL-E (1). The group started as `dalle-pytorch-replicate` but was never officially "blessed" by Phil Wang who seems to enjoy being a free agent (can't blame him).

https://github.com/lucidrains/DALLE-pytorch/issues/116 is where the discord got kicked off originally. There's a lot of other interactions between us in the github there. You should be able to find when Phil was approached by Jenia Jitsev, Jan Ebert, and Mehdi Cherti (all starting LAION members) who graciously offered the chance to replicate the DALL-E paper using their available compute at the JUWELS and JUWELS Booster HPC system. This all predates Emad's arrival. I believe he showed up around the time guided diffusion and GLIDE, but it may have been a bit earlier.

Data work originally focused on amassing several of the bigger datasets of the time. Getting CC12M downloaded and trained on was something of an early milestone (robvanvolt's work). A lot of early work was like that though, shuffling through CC12M, COCO, etc. with the dalle-pytorch codebase until we got an avocado armchair.

Christophe Schumann was an early contributor as well and great at organizing and rallying. He focused a lot on the early data scraping work for what would become the "LAION5B" dataset. I don't want to credit him with the coding and I'm ashamed to admit I can't recall who did much of the work there - but a distributed scraping program was developed (the name was something@home... not scraping@home?).

I should also mention Romain Beaumont, an original member. His work on clip-retrieval was great and allowed us to eventually ship CLIP embeddings data for LAION5B and do semantic search over the dataset. He worked on a lot there however, including code for training and model architecture. Smart guy! I have heard he's now with Stability? Haven't confirmed though.

The discord link on Phil Wang's readme at dalle-pytorch got a lot of traffic and a lot of people who wanted to pitch in with the scraping effort.

Eventually a lot of people from Eleuther and many other teams mingled with us, some sort of non-profit org was created in Germany I believe for legal purposes. The dataset continued to grow and the group moved from training DALLE's to finetuning diffusion models. Eventually it was decided by core members that we should get a proper name and LAION was chosen.

The `CompVis` team were great inspiration at the time and much of their work on VQGAN and then latent diffusion models basically kept us motivated. As I mentioned a personal motivation was Katherine Crowson's work on a variety of things like CLIP-guided vqgan, diffusion, etc.

I believe Emad Mostaque showed up around the time GLIDE was coming out? I want to say he donated money for scrapers to be run on AWS to speed up data collection. I was largely hands off for much of the data scraping process and mostly enjoyed training new models on data we had.

As with any online community things got pretty ill-defined, roles changed over, volunteers came/went, etc. I would hardly call this definitive and that's at least partially the reason it's hard to trace as an outsider. That much of the early history is scattered about GitHub issues and PR's can't have helped though.