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Filed under Image · 2026

DALL-E 2

2022 - 2026, 4 years old

OpenAI's second-generation text-to-image model that opened consumer AI image generation to a mass audience.

DALL-E 2 launched in April 2022 as an invite-only beta, opened to the public that September, and became the first image generator most people ever used. By 2023 it had been displaced inside OpenAI's own product by DALL-E 3, and by 2025 by the gpt-image family. OpenAI sent a deprecation notice on November 14, 2025, and removed DALL-E 2 and DALL-E 3 from the API on May 12, 2026, pointing developers to gpt-image-1 and gpt-image-1-mini. The model that proved a market existed was retired three years after creating it.

Founded
2022-04
Shut down
2026-05-12
Funding raised
Undisclosed
Years alive
4
Founders
OpenAI

Sources

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