DALL·E Explained in Under 5 Minutes

It seems like every few months, someone publishes a machine learning paper or demo that makes my jaw drop. This behemoth 12-billion-parameter neural network takes a text caption (i.e. "an armchair in the shape of an avocado") and generates images to match it: I think its pictures are pretty inspiring (I'd buy one of those avocado chairs), but what's even more impressive is DALL·E's ability to understand and render concepts of space, time, and even logic (more on that in a second). In this post, I'll give you a quick overview of what DALL·E can do, how it works, how it fits in with recent trends in ML, and why it's significant. In July, DALL·E's creator, the company OpenAI, released a similarly huge model called GPT-3 that wowed the world with its ability to generate human-like text, including Op Eds, poems, sonnets, and even computer code.