Billionaire technology entrepreneur Reid Hoffman is leveraging OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 artificial intelligence software to create Solana NFTs.
Reid Hoffman, billionaire technology entrepreneur and co-founder of business networking platform LinkedIn, has announced that he will release a series of Solana NFTs. Hoffman will base the NFTs on images he himself will create using OpenAI’s artificial intelligence-powered DALL-E 2 software.
Incidentally, the DALL-E 2 is a transformer model of the DALL-E that OpenAI developed and was first announced to the public in January 2021. The current iteration of the software generates more realistic and accurate digital images from natural language descriptions with 4x greater resolution.
DALL-E is a portmanteau of Pixar’s 2008 animated film “Wall-E” and Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali.
AI-Rendered Solana NFTs
Hoffman announced the initiative on Twitter and noted that the first piece would be auctioned off on Magic Eden, the largest Solana NFT marketplace.
“Inspired by the potential of DALL-E and NFTs—and the possibilities that they unleash together—my team and I have created a number of small image collections that we’ll be tokenizing as NFTs,” he tweeted.
The project, dubbed “Untranslatable Words,” comprises 11 tokenized images created using DALL-E 2, which, as already mentioned earlier, generates art based on written prompts.
As if to explain why he decided to turn the DALL-E creations into NFTs, Hoffman tweeted:
“Anyone can ‘right-click-save’ a DALL-E original and make infinite copies,” he wrote. “Enter: NFTs—a technology for making a digital asset provably scarce and unique. What happens when you combine two of the most significant technological changes? How might they come together?”
DALL-E Solana NFTs Proceeds
The auction for Hoffman’s DALL-E Solana NFTs opened at 1 PM on July 22 and will run for 24 hours. The first of the 11-piece series put up for auction is called “mångata,” which, at this time of writing, has a current top bid of 18 SOL, or about $789.75.
The “mångata” Created Using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 AI Image Rendering Software
The word mångata is a Swedish term that means “the road-like reflection of the moon on water.” According to Hoffman, his inspiration for this piece were “words that exist in another language where no single-word equivalent in your own language exists.”
Hoffman will split the funds generated by the sale of the Solana NFTs among charitable causes and his team that collaborated with him on the project. If any NFT from the series remains unpurchased during the auction, it will be burned or destroyed permanently.
In-Depth Look at DALL-E 2
The DALL-E 2 is the latest iteration of OpenAI’s artificial intelligence-powered image rendering platform. Since it was announced in April, images rendered using DALL-E 2 have been widely shared across the Internet.
The DALL-E 2 software allows a user to create different artworks based on user-provided text. What’s impressive about the AI software is it can yield remarkably accurate results even if a user provides combinations of unrelated terms. However, even if the software reeks of potential, OpenAI admits that the technology requires implementing thoughtful policies to mitigate abuse and bias.
OpenAI has prohibited commercializing DALL-E 2-generated images until yesterday since the project was still in a “preview” release state. The project’s documentation explicitly states that the sale of NFTs is not allowed under the terms and conditions.
Still, OpenAI launched a new beta version of DALL-E 2 yesterday, enabling commercialization rights for creators who generate images. This development allowed Hoffman’s Solana NFT project to come to fruition. Hoffman is a board member at OpenAI and has not held back from speaking extensively about DALL-E on his LinkedIn page.
“Visual expression can’t exist without technology,” Hoffman wrote on Wednesday. “Great artists have always been great innovators. If groundbreaking artists like Da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keefe, and Frida Kahlo were alive today, I’m sure they’d be experimenting with DALL-E.”
It is believed that OpenAI will make the DALL-E 2 beta version available to one million users who have signed up on the waiting list to allow them to try the tool’s latest iteration.
Get more news updates
Get more NFT news updates at Omnimint News. For more information on Omnimint, and details on how to join our community, please follow our Twitter, or subscribe to our Telegram channel for more updates, and please feel free to submit your article.