---
id: "2022-04-06-dall-e-2"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-04-06-dall-e-2/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2022-04-06"
date_precision: day
category: media-generation
importance: 4
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-04-06-dall-e-2/

# DALL·E 2 brings photorealistic text-to-image generation

OpenAI's DALL·E 2 used a diffusion decoder conditioned on CLIP embeddings to generate high-resolution, photorealistic images from text, kicking off 2022's image-generation boom alongside Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

## Key facts
- Announced 6 April 2022
- Paper: 'Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents', arXiv 2204.06125
- Supported inpainting and image variations
- Opened to the public without a waitlist in September 2022

## What happened

DALL·E 2 produced images of a quality that made text-to-image a mainstream phenomenon.

## Why it matters

Marked diffusion models' takeover of image generation and triggered debates on artists' rights and synthetic media.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [DALL·E 2 (OpenAI)](https://openai.com/index/dall-e-2/) (openai.com, official)
2. [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.06125) (arxiv.org, paper)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2022-08-22: [Stable Diffusion released as open weights](https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-08-22-stable-diffusion/index.md)
- 2021-01-05: [OpenAI unveils DALL·E and CLIP](https://postcutoff.com/e/2021-01-05-dall-e-clip/index.md)