OpenAI DALL·E Beta Now Available Without Waitlist

OpenAI has removed the waitlist for the DALL·E beta, enabling immediate access for new users to sign up and generate images. This transition to open access follows an iterative deployment strategy designed to scale the system responsibly while refining safety filters and incorporating user feedback.

Current Scale and User Adoption

DALL·E has reached a scale of over 1.5 million active users who generate more than 2 million images per day. The user base spans a diverse range of professionals, including artists, creative directors, authors, and architects. Additionally, a community of over 100,000 users shares creations and feedback via Discord.

Feature Development and User Influence

User feedback, particularly from artists, has directly influenced the development of DALL·E's feature set. A primary example is the introduction of Outpainting in July 2022, a tool that allows users to extend an image beyond its original borders to create larger compositions of any size. The platform also introduced collections to help users organize and expedite their creative workflows.

Safety Improvements and Content Filtering

OpenAI utilized the iterative beta period to strengthen safety systems and prevent misuse. The lab has implemented more robust filters to reject prompts that attempt to generate sexual, violent, or other content that violates OpenAI's content policy. These efforts include the development of new detection and response techniques to mitigate potential misuse as the system scales to a wider audience.

Future Availability and API Access

OpenAI is currently testing a DALL·E API with a select group of customers. The lab intends to offer this API more broadly to developers and businesses in the future, enabling the integration of DALL·E's image generation capabilities into third-party applications.

DALL·E Development Timeline

The path to open beta access involved several key research and deployment milestones:

  • September 2022: DALL·E beta becomes available without a waitlist.
  • July 2022: Outpainting is added to the Edit tool.
  • June 2022: DALL·E enters beta with pricing, onboarding over 1 million users.
  • April 2022: Research preview expands to 1,000 users per week.
  • March 2022: The DALL·E 2 paper is published, and a research preview is released to 200 artists, researchers, and trusted users.
  • November 2021: The first version of the GLIDE paper is published.
  • April 2021: Diffusion models are shown to outperform GANs on ImageNet synthesis.
  • December 2020: OpenAI announces the first DALL·E and open-sources CLIP.

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