# DALL-E > **Status (May 2026); superseded.** DALL-E was [[OpenAI]]'s standalone text-to-image lineage. It has been folded into [[ChatGPT]] via [[GPT Image 1]] (March 2025) and now [[ChatGPT Images 2.0]] (April 2026). The DALL-E brand and standalone API are retired. New image work should target ChatGPT Images 2.0; this note is kept for provenance. DALL-E was the original text-to-image AI generation model created by OpenAI. First announced in January 2021, it pioneered the consumer text-to-image category and went through three named generations before the lineage was absorbed into the assistant. ## Lineage ``` DALL-E (Jan 2021) → DALL-E 2 (2022) → DALL-E 3 (2023) ↓ GPT Image 1 (Mar 2025) ← architectural shift; native multimodal ↓ ChatGPT Images 2.0 (Apr 2026) ← reasoning-driven, current default ``` GPT Image 1 was the inflection point; image generation moved from a separate diffusion model to a single autoregressive multimodal model that handles text, vision, and image generation through the same weights. That ended DALL-E as a separate product. ## Why it was retired The same [[OpenAI Product Consolidation]] pattern that retired [[Sora]] for video; standalone image brand became a capability inside the assistant. Users do not pick between DALL-E and GPT Image; the assistant routes. Brand overhead removed; surface area reduced. ## Original versions - DALL-E: https://openai.com/index/dall-e/ - DALL-E 2: https://openai.com/index/dall-e-2/ - DALL-E 3: https://openai.com/index/dall-e-3/ ## References - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DALL-E - Replacement (ChatGPT Images 2.0): https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-images-2-0/ ## Related - [[OpenAI]] - [[ChatGPT]] - [[GPT Image 1]] - [[ChatGPT Images 2.0]] - [[Sora]] - [[OpenAI Product Consolidation]] - [[AI image generation models]] - [[AI Image Generation (MoC)]]