The Sequence Scope: DALL-E API and the Open Source Model vs. API Debate

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Jesus Rodriguez
4 min readNov 6, 2022
Generated by DALL-E Prompt: The Generative artificial intelligence revolution is here

📝 Editorial: DALL-E API and the Open Source Model vs. API Debate

There is no other possible topic for this week’s editorial than the release of the highly anticipated OpenAI DALL-E API. The doubts about whether OpenAI was going to enable programmatic access to DALL-E due to ethical concerns were finally put to rest with the release of the DALL-E API Beta. Now developers can integrate DALL-E into their applications using a very simple programming model. Seems pretty obvious that the release of the DALL-E API was catalyzed by Stability AI’s bold move of open-sourcing Stable Diffusion, which quickly gained incredible traction within the generative AI community. Similarly to the path followed with models like GPT-3 and Codex, OpenAI decided to enable API access to DALL-E but not open-source it like Stable Diffusion.

The friction between controlled API versus fully open-source distribution mechanisms will likely be at the center of the generative AI debate for the next…

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Jesus Rodriguez

CEO of IntoTheBlock, President of Faktory, President of NeuralFabric and founder of The Sequence , Lecturer at Columbia University, Wharton, Angel Investor...