Ask DALL·E 2, an image generation system created by OpenAI, to paint a picture of "goldfish slurping Coca-Cola on a beach," and it will spit out surreal images of exactly that. The program would have encountered images of beaches, goldfish, and Coca-Cola during training, but it's highly unlikely it would have seen one in which all three came together. Yet DALL·E 2 can assemble the concepts into something that might have made Dalí proud. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences. DALL·E 2 is a type of generative model--a system that attempts to use training data to generate something new that's comparable to the data in terms of quality and variety.

Ask DALL·E 2, an image generation system created by OpenAI, to paint a picture of "goldfish slurping Coca-Cola on a beach," and it will spit out surreal images of exactly that. The program would have encountered images of beaches, goldfish and Coca-Cola during training, but it's highly unlikely it would have seen one in which all three came together. Yet DALL·E 2 can assemble the concepts into something that might have made Dalí proud. DALL·E 2 is a type of generative model -- a system that attempts to use training data to generate something new that's comparable to the data in terms of quality and variety. This is one of the hardest problems in machine learning, and getting to this point has been a difficult journey.