DALL-E (stylized as
DALL·E) is an
artificial intelligence program developed by
OpenAI that creates images from textual descriptions.
It uses a 12-billion parameter
[1] version of the
GPT-3 Transformer model to interpret
natural language inputs (such as "a green leather purse shaped like a pentagon" or "an
isometric view of a sad
capybara") and generate corresponding images.
[2] It can create images of realistic objects ("a stained glass window with an image of a blue strawberry") as well as objects that do not exist in reality ("a cube with the texture of a porcupine").
[3][4][5] Its name is a
portmanteau of
WALL-E and
Salvador Dalí.
[2][1]
Many
neural nets from the 2000s onward have been able to generate realistic images.
[2] DALL-E, however, is able to generate them from
natural language prompts, which it "understands [...] and rarely fails in any serious way".
[2]
OpenAI has not released
source code for either model, although a "controller" of DALL-E is available on OpenAI's website, where output from a limited selection of sample prompts can be viewed.
[1] Open-source alternatives, trained on smaller amounts of data, like DALL-E Mini, have been released by others.
[6]
According to
MIT Technology Review, one of OpenAI's objectives was to "give language models a better grasp of the everyday concepts that humans use to make sense of things".
[7]
