Meet DALL-E, the A.I. That Draws Anything at Your Command

A half decade ago, the world's leading A.I. labs built systems that could identify objects in digital images and even generate images on their own, including flowers, dogs, cars and faces. A few years later, they built systems that could do much the same with written language, summarizing articles, answering questions, generating tweets and even writing blog posts. Now, researchers are combining those technologies to create new forms of A.I. DALL-E is a notable step forward because it juggles both language and images and, in some cases, grasps the relationship between the two. "We can now use multiple, intersecting streams of information to create better and better technology," said Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, an artificial intelligence lab in Seattle. The technology is not perfect.