Models & Products Updated 2026

DALL·E

Definition

OpenAI's text-to-image model that generates images from natural-language descriptions, popularizing prompt-driven image creation.

DALL·E, introduced by Ramesh et al. (2021), generates images from text prompts by modelling text and image tokens as a single stream with a Transformer. It demonstrated convincing zero-shot text-to-image generation and helped launch the consumer wave of generative image tools.

Later text-to-image systems increasingly use diffusion models, but DALL·E established the prompt-to-picture paradigm now common in creative tools.

References

Primary, peer-reviewed and archival sources for this definition.

Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation
Ramesh, A., Pavlov, M., Goh, G., Gray, S., Voss, C., Radford, A., Chen, M., & Sutskever, I. (2021). Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2021).

Dictionary & encyclopedic entries

Cite this entry

MultipleChat. "DALL·E." MultipleChat AI & LLM Glossary, 2026. https://multiple.chat/ai-glossary/dalle

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