Atlas record: https://www.aitimeline.dev/en/events/evt-0764/
Availability · July 20, 2022
DALL·E 2 opens in a paid beta
On 20 July 2022 OpenAI opened the DALL·E 2 beta and began inviting a million people from the waitlist. Each got 50 free credits in the first month and 15 a month after, 115 credits cost $15, and users got full rights to commercialise the images.
Why it matters
Photorealistic text-to-image generation became a product with a price and a commercial licence rather than research access for a chosen few. Before it, by TechCrunch's account, the preview had over 100,000 users.
In the paper of 13 April 2022 the model is called unCLIP: 1024x1024 images and a zero-shot FID of 10.39 on MS-COCO. By OpenAI's account the resolution is four times DALL·E's, and raters preferred DALL·E 2 for caption matching in 71.7% of comparisons and for photorealism in 88.8%. With the beta OpenAI began rejecting uploads of realistic faces and attempts at the likeness of public figures; the service opened without a waitlist on 28 September 2022.
Event record
- Event date
- July 20, 2022
- Timeline date
- Event date
- Verification
- Sources gathered automatically · September 25, 2026
- Lines
- ID
- evt-0764
The day the beta opened, by OpenAI and TechCrunch. The paper on the model was submitted on 13 April 2022; the day of the April announcement no longer stands on the OpenAI page and is not claimed. Without a waitlist from 28 September 2022.
Related events
Earlier
- Related Midjourney opens its beta to everyone 2022links to this record
Motherboard on 18 July 2022 describes Midjourney as a rival to DALL·E, whose makers were just then preparing paid access.
- Contrasts Imagen: a large language encoder for generation 2022links to this record
The paper compares Imagen with DALL·E 2: an FID of 7.27 against 10.39 on COCO, and on DrawBench raters prefer Imagen.
- Builds on DALL·E 2021
OpenAI presents DALL·E 2 as the successor to the DALL·E of January 2021, at four times the resolution.