About two weeks ago, back when Twitter wasn’t the current thing being discussed on, well, Twitter, you may have seen these threads floating around of vivid, somewhat strange images. At first glance, you might think surrealism is bouncing back a century after its birth. You wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, but there’s a bit more to the story.

Images range from teddy bears working on new AI research on the moon in the 1980s, depictions of what life will look like on Mars, and probably one of our favorites – a wise cat meditating in the Himalayas searching for enlightenment.

The tool in question is the successor of DALL-E, which OpenAI introduced in early 2021. In short, DALL-E is an AI system that generates images from text, using a process called diffusion, a model that learns to create images by gradually noising and denoising its training data. You simply write down what you’d like to see and DALL-E creates an image based on that description. DALL-E 2 takes this technology and research further, adding higher accuracy and resolution, as well as the ability to create new versions of already generated images.

OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, called the new project “the most delightful thing to play with we’ve created so far… and fun in a way I haven’t felt from technology in a while.” While that’s certainly true and its abilities are impressive, the OpenAI team is purposefully not releasing DALL-E publicly until it’s able to mitigate and better understand its risks and limitations, which is said to be this summer.

It remains to be seen how those working on Generative AI will be able to address its challenges (think deep fakes, reinforcement of stereotypes, overall bias), but there’s certainly something exciting about seeing the foundations of artificial general intelligence being put in place and what makers will build with releases like OpenAI’s project.

Until we can get our hands on DALL-E 2, here are a few other recently launched tools using AI:

Quicklines automatically creates personalized ice breakers to add to your cold outreach. You upload a CSV, wait three minutes, and receive the sheet of phrases to use in the first sentence of cold emails.

Cartoonize generates a cartoon based on your selfie.

Elai.io helps you create educational and marketing video content with AI-generated humans from plain text.

• Eccco creates a space for any link on the Internet and lets you add and see comments for that content.

• Elon Mars is a JavaScript-based video game where Musk is on Mars and the goal is to collect as many $DOGE as possible while fighting Jeff Bezos as an enemy.

• Death Convo Game wants to make talking about death less taboo. You answer daily questions on the subject with friends and family.

• 3D Bay for Canva offers royalty-free illustrations for topics like crypto, NFTs, climate change, and AR/VR, as a Canva plug-in.