Why everyone is talking about an image generator released by an Elon Musk-backed A.I. lab

Armchairs in the shape of avocados and baby daikon radishes wearing tutus are among the quirky images created by a new piece of software from OpenAI, an Elon Musk-backed artificial intelligence lab in San Francisco. OpenAI trained the software, known as Dall-E, to generate images from short text captions. It specifically used a dataset of 12 billion images and their captions, which were found on the internet. The lab said Dall-E -- a portmanteau of Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali and Wall-E, a small animated robot from the Pixar movie of the same name -- had learned how to create images for a wide range of concepts. OpenAI showed off some of the results in a blog post published on Tuesday.