The name that taught the world to say „prompt” left OpenAI's catalogue yesterday — three months after the model itself did

OpenAI switched off the official DALL·E GPT inside ChatGPT on 30 August 2026, the step it had announced in its release notes on 31 July. The advice given to users was to download any pictures they wanted to keep. With that, the word DALL·E no longer appears anywhere in OpenAI's current product line: it is absent from the company's API model list, where image generation is now handled by GPT Image 1, 1.5 and 2. Most coverage has framed this as a deadline for saving images. The more accurate reading is that yesterday's shutdown removed a shop window, not a model. OpenAI notified developers of the deprecation on 14 November 2025 and removed both dall-e-2 and dall-e-3 from the API on 12 May 2026, pointing them to the GPT Image family. The programmable model has therefore been gone for three and a half months; what survived until yesterday was the branded entry point in ChatGPT. The distinction matters for anyone reading a catalogue like this one. A model disappearing from a chat interface and a model being switched off are different events, and they are routinely reported as one. In this case both have now happened, which is why our profiles of DALL·E, DALL·E 2 and DALL·E 3 are marked as retired rather than merely legacy. What ends here is a naming convention as much as a product. The first DALL·E, shown in January 2021, was a research demonstration that could not be used by the public; DALL·E 2 turned it into a queue-based service; DALL·E 3 made the model follow the sentence rather than sample its keywords, and put it inside a chatbot that rewrote the request on the user's behalf. That last arrangement — a well-behaved image model plus a language model writing its instructions — is how essentially every image tool works today, including the GPT Image line that replaced it. The mechanism outlived the name by a wide margin. Image generation in ChatGPT itself is unaffected, and user-built GPTs with image generation switched on continue to work.