Is DALL-E Open-Source?
DALL-E is a novel artificial intelligence (AI) art generator created by OpenAI to help artists and anyone else wishing to generate original images quickly and easily. This neural network generates images from text prompts–but is DALL-E open-source? This article will address this and other related concerns.
What is DALL-E?
As noted above, DALL-E is a neural network designed by OpenAI to generate images from natural languages, such as text prompts, and is an enormous 12-billion parameter version of the GPT-3 model.
It uses artificial learning capabilities to learn and understand inputs in order to adequately generate the desired outputs. This system can generate original images from text prompts, provided it uses the right datasets. So, the first question you need to answer before you start using DALL-E to generate images is: What dataset does the DALL-E use?
Like many other AI art generators, OpenAI used images collected from the internet to train its algorithms to follow commands. When you input specific text captions, the algorithms will generate your desired output using the datasets used during its training–but this doesn’t mean that it’s going to repeat errors that may be found in the datasets during training. Unlike previous AI art generators, DALL-E 2 doesn’t generalize unseen data during training and testing.
Demos have shown that DALL-E 2 does exceptionally well on bizarre composite text prompts despite never having seen such texts elsewhere, even during training. Additionally, this model can combine seemingly unrelated concepts to generate something unique.
Is DALL-E an Open-Source Model?
Unfortunately, OpenAI is yet to launch an open-source version of DALL-E. As noted earlier, the current model is only available to the users who made it onto the waitlist before it was launched in 2021. The makers of DALL-E say that they are still studying the vast societal inferences that the current model of DALL-E will have. It’s expected to have a significant implication on journalism, art, content writing, graphics, and stock photography.
The company regards the current model of DALL-E as a research project that is not accessible through their API. So, it’s using the few people from its waitlist as a study group to establish all the competencies and limitations of this model before it is released to the public. The waitlist has only a few hundred eager expectant users and most of them are OpenAI employees or somehow related to those employees.
According to OpenAI, the low number of active users will keep the output low enough to enable it to review the generated art and quickly identify potential misuse. The company adds that the delayed release of the AI program to the public is part of its long-held post-deployment risk analysis policy, which involves starting with a controlled group of users to facilitate continuous rehearsal. With these limitations, the company can easily control the use of the generated images and prevent misuse.
Although OpenAI was initially established as a non-profit organization, it announced in 2019 that it had restructured its operations as a capped profit organization that will be cutting returns from investments beyond a certain threshold. This was followed by reports revealing that Microsoft had invested $1 billion in OpenAI to create artificial general intelligence. Soon after, OpenAI announced that it had given Microsoft an exclusively licensed GPT-3 (a language model). So, with Microsoft in the middle of the operations, you may have to wait a little longer for DALL-E to finally become open-source.