I meant to say that Dall-E 2's approach is closer to "teaching a three year old to paint" than the alternative methods. Instead of trying to maximize agreement to a text embedding like other methods, Dall-E 2 first predicts an image embedding (very roughly analogous to envisioning what you're going to draw before you start laying down paint), and then the decoder knows how to go from an embedding to an image (very roughly analogous to "knowing how to paint"). This is in contrast to approaches which operate by repeatedly querying "does this look like the text prompt?" as they refine the image (roughly analogous to not really knowing how to paint, but having a critic who tells you if you're getting warmer or colder).