DALL-E 2
The 2022 model that took AI image generation mainstream, and the first to ship real inpainting, outpainting, and variations.
Retired
DALL-E 2 appears to be discontinued or shut down. This page is kept as an archive record and is excluded from search engines.
About
OpenAI announced DALL-E 2 on April 6, 2022 as the successor to the original DALL-E. Rather than extending the GPT-3 token approach of its predecessor, it used an inverted version of CLIP (OpenAI's image-understanding model), generating images from text embeddings, and shipped at 1024x1024, four times the resolution of DALL-E 1. In OpenAI's own human evaluations it was preferred over DALL-E 1 in 71.7% of caption-matching comparisons and 88.8% of photorealism comparisons. The rollout became the template for how these models launch: a research preview, a beta for 1 million waitlisted users in July 2022, credits-based pricing, and public access that September.
Beyond generation, DALL-E 2 introduced the editing workflow the industry still uses: inpainting (select a region and describe the change), outpainting, and variations of an uploaded image. It reached developers through the OpenAI API in November 2022 and powered Microsoft's Bing Image Creator and Designer app. OpenAI added C2PA provenance metadata to its outputs in February 2024, and the model was removed from the OpenAI API on May 12, 2026, with newer GPT Image models taking over generation in ChatGPT.
Specs
Context window
Pricing
Free quota
API access
Weights
Released
Benchmarks
FID 10.39 at release (vendor-reported); 71.7% caption-matching and 88.8% photorealism preference over DALL-E 1 in OpenAI human evals
Provider-reported unless a source says otherwise. Benchmarks are marketing-adjacent by nature — treat them as directional.
Use cases
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: April 6, 2022 announcement and phased 2022 rollout documented on Wikipedia's DALL-E page; FID 10.39 vendor-reported (aimlapi); May 12, 2026 API removal reported by pricing trackers (invertedstone); historical per-image pricing from the OpenAI developer docs via a community spec. Strengths: historically definitive model with published eval numbers, enormous downstream influence, first-class editing features. Docked for: (1) fully proprietary with no weights and no surviving official API, a historical entry, not a working one; (2) training data and several headline numbers were never independently replicated. License: proprietary.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 9.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 4.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 2.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · OpenAI; announced 2022-04-06
- · FID 10.39 vendor-reported at release; 71.7% caption-matching / 88.8% photorealism human preference over DALL-E 1 (OpenAI)
- · Historical API pricing: $0.016-$0.02/image; API removal May 12, 2026 per pricing trackers
- · Lifecycle: retired (API shut down)