If it's what I'm thinking about, I think they were forced to have decentralized image caching (i.e. the "user" is the one downloading images, Google just indexe

If it's what I'm thinking about, I think they were forced to have decentralized image caching (i.e. the "user" is the one downloading images, Google just indexes). LAION-5b is also just an indexer (in terms of images).