Boris Dayma initially created and launched DALL·E Mini during a hackathon organized by Hugging Face, in collaboration with Google in July 2021. This community event brought together around 800 participants, during which Boris Dayma built the first iteration of what would become a viral, open-source text-to-image model. This image generator was based on smaller, open-source AI models like VQGAN and CLIP. It was trained on publicly available datasets. It brought AI art to the masses long before full access to other image generators like DALL·E 2, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion was common.
After it gained popularity, OpenAI reportedly asked them to rebrand to avoid misleading people that it was affiliated with, or endorsed by, OpenAI. The project was renamed Crayon, a simple and amicable rebranding, without a legal lawsuit.
