The people who first originated the clip guided diffusion approach (rivershavewings around this time last year) are now working for stable diffusion so it's somewhat arguable that dalle wasn't actually first (just first to make a user friendly saas for it).

OpenAI announced and released CLIP on GitHub on January 5, 2021: https://github.com/openai/CLIP

You need CLIP to have CLIP guided diffusion. So the current situation seems to trace back to OpenAI and the MIT-licensed code they released the day DALL-E was announced. I would love to be corrected if I've misunderstood the situation.

You're totally right, OpenAI released CLIP in january. But I mean CLIP isn't an image generator, it's just a classifer. If we restrict the question to actual text to image generators (ignoring deep dream or some of the 'kinda cool but far from the coherency of post-2021 generators') then clip guided diffusion is kinda the first.

This has happened so many times in the past 50 years in tech: one company creates a superior technology that has small sales compared to the bigger company that commodifies it at scale either through marketing or capex dollars, and thus squashes the smaller inventing company into irrelevance (or out of existence).

BetaMax > VHS

Xerox Park > [ Mac > Windows ]

PS2 Bus > ISA Bus

AltaVista > Google

I'm curious to see if Tesla is hit by this now that the big automakers finally woke up and realized there's a colossal market for low-cost EVs.