See also: DALL·E 2⁠, which generates more realistic and accurate images with 4x greater resolution.

GPT‑3 showed that language can be used to instruct a large neural network to perform a variety of text generation tasks. Image GPT⁠ showed that the same type of neural network can also be used to generate images with high fidelity. We extend these findings to show that manipulating visual concepts through language is now within reach.

Like GPT‑3, DALL·E is a transformer language model. It receives both the text and the image as a single stream of data containing up to 1280 tokens, and is trained using maximum likelihood to generate all of the tokens, one after another. A

This training procedure allows DALL·E to not only generate an image from scratch, but also to regenerate any rectangular region of an existing image that extends to the bottom-right corner, in a way that is consistent with the text prompt.