Earlier today, OpenAI research laboratory founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others, released the second iteration of an artificial intelligence tool called DALL-E 2. The new AI tool can create and edit images from natural language inputs.
Ask DALL-E 2 to draw "teddy bears mixing sparkling chemicals as mad scientists in a steampunk style", and boom: you get the image above.
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is one of those things that we hear about often but don't grasp at a gut level. After all, human brains don't comprehend Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3's capacity of 175 billion machine learning parameters (yeah, don't worry about it), but we understand the nascent power of AI when we see it generate photorealistic images from text inputs.
Just a little over a year ago, OpenAI released DALL-E - the first iteration of the text-to-image AI tool (The name is a combination of Salvador Dali and Pixar's WALL-E). And while it was pretty good, you can definitely tell that the images are computer generated.
In a blog post introducing DALL-E 2, Altman shows us what a difference one year can make in AI research. "It’s a reminder that predictions about AI are very difficult to make. A decade ago, the conventional wisdom was that AI would first impact physical labor, and then cognitive labor, and then maybe someday it could do creative work. It now looks like it’s going to go in the opposite order."
Take a look at some of the amazing images that DALL-E 2 created below.
"Teddy bears mixing sparkling chemicals as mad scientists as digital art" was the text prompt for DALL-E 2 to generate the image above.
"An astronaut riding a horse in a photorealistic style" as drawn by DALL-E 2.
DALL-E 2 text prompt: "A bowl of soup that looks like a monster knitted out of wool"
AI text input: "An astronaut playing basketball with cats in space as a children's book illustration"
"Teddy bears working on new AI research on the moon in 1980s" as drawn by DALL-E 2.
Here's a video clip explaining DALL-E 2 from OpenAI.