Point-E, unlike similar systems, "leverages a large corpus of (text, image) pairs, allowing it to follow diverse and complex prompts, while our image-to-3D model is trained on a smaller dataset of ...

Point clouds are what 3D scanners create when an object is scanned, and to become useful, those point clouds are usually post-processed into 3D models (specifically, meshes) like an .obj or .stl file.