DALL-E Mini Is the Internet's Favorite AI Meme Machine

On June 6, Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source artificial intelligence projects, saw traffic to an AI image-generation tool called DALL-E Mini skyrocket. The outwardly simple app, which generates nine images in response to any typed text prompt, was launched nearly a year ago by an independent developer. But after some recent improvements and a few viral tweets, its ability to crudely sketch all manner of surreal, hilarious, and even nightmarish visions suddenly became meme magic. As more people created and shared DALL-E Mini images on Twitter and Reddit, and more new users arrived, Hugging Face saw its servers overwhelmed with traffic. "Our engineers didn't sleep for the first night," says Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, on a video call from his home in Miami.