Craiyon

Craiyon is an artificial intelligence (AI) image generator capable of generating images from text prompts. Craiyon was developed to be a lighter version of OpenAI's DALL-E and is developed to be as easy to use as the original DALL-E. Formerly known as DALL-E Mini, Craiyon later changed its name to avoid confusion with the DALL-E and DALL-E 2 models from OpenAI, and at the request of OpenAI.

The company was founded in 2022 by Boris Dayma and is headquartered in Houston, Texas. The founding came after Boris Dayma took part in the JAX/Flax Community Week in June 2021 and first proposed the concept behind Craiyon on the Hugging Face forums. The initial version was trained for three days on a single TPUv3-8 provided by Google Cloud for the duration of the program. Despite the limitations in time and compute architecture, it was a largely successful concept.

Craiyon is a free-to-use tool for non-commercial purposes—with paid subscription tiers for those interested in commercial use-cases—and is sponsored by advertising for the free tier. The paid tiers also offer lower wait times for image generation.

The Craiyon model was initially trained on millions of images from the internet and their accompanying captions. These captions lead the model to choose images to use based on the text prompts. The model was trained to combine concepts to create new images from a prompt it has a reference for.