I don't mean this to sound overly negative, because I absolutely think DALL-E is a killer app amongst recent AI advances. But the thing that made DALL-E astonishing is that it was... good. While DALL-E Mini mimics a lot of the technical advances and you can kind of see what it's getting at with its outputs, they're still mostly garbage. Very clever garbage! But they lack the emotional impact that - woah! - this is doing something superhuman.

Obviously the hope is that somehow this and future advances can be democratised. It was funny that Asimov's The Last Question has been posted here a couple of times recently because it makes such a big thing about world-sized computers and how advanced minicomputers would be. It's easy to read and scoff at the naivety... before realising we could easily be heading back in that direction for many impactful future technologies.