In spite of the many challenges we’d faced along the way, we’d actually done it: fifteen million images spread across twenty-two thousand distinct categories, culled from nearly a billion candidates in total, and annotated by a global team of more than forty-eight thousand contributors hailing from 167 countries. It boasted the scale and diversity we’d spent years dreaming of, all while maintaining a consistent level of precision: each individual image was not just manually labeled, but organized within a hierarchy and verified in triplicate.
