OpenAI just made ChatGPT images 4x faster and easier on the eyes — now CEO Sam Altman faces the GPU crunch

Remember last year when OpenAI ran 12 days of 'Shipmas', launching a ton of products and services, including its $200/month ChatGPT Pro subscription plan? Well, the AI firm is sort of running a similar campaign but on a subtle scale.

As you may know, the company unveiled GPT-5.2 last week as a response to Gemini 3, which rattled CEO Sam Altman into declaring "code red". However, the company is seemingly over the hump with the executive eyeing a January exit from the situation. Altman indicated that Google's Gemini 3 launch had a lesser impact on ChatGPT's metrics than previously thought.

OpenAI CEO also announced that the company had a "few little Christmas presents" for its users this week. Today, the company unveiled new ChatGPT images, which Sam Altman referred to as "something fun".

ChatGPT Images is powered by OpenAI's new image generation model. According to OpenAI, "it makes precise edits while keeping details intact, and generates images up to 4x faster".

GPT 1.5 Images shipped in broad availability for all ChatGPT users and via its API. OpenAI also announced a new images feature within ChatGPT, designed to improve image generation by sparking inspiration and making creative exploration effortless.

The new Images experience in ChatGPT is touted to be more precise, adhering to your requests and prompts while preserving critical elements like lighting, composition, and people’s appearance on uploaded images.

What's more, the model is now better at editing tasks, making it easier for users to add, remove, and blend to achieve the desired output.

Additionally, the model comes with built‑in styles and ideas from the start, so you may not even need a prompt to enhance your image."The model follows instructions more reliably than our initial version," OpenAI indicated. "This enables more precise edits as well as more intricate original compositions, where relationships between elements are preserved as intended."

Finally, the model is also better at text rendering with the capability of handling denser and smaller text. OpenAI is making it easier for users to generate images directly from ChatGPT through a dedicated home for images, which can be accessed from the sidebar on the mobile app and on chatgpt.com.

In 2023, Former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey warned that it'll be impossible to tell what's real from the fake in 5-10 years. "It will feel like you're in a simulation," the executive added. With the emergence of sophisticated image generation tools like Google's Nano Banana and now ChatGPT Images 1.5, it seems like Dorsey's early predictions are subtly becoming reality.

Early this year, OpenAI launched ChatGPT-4o, which led to the birth of the viral Studio Ghibli meme trend, although it sparked backlash and copyright-related issues. For context, the model's release contributed to ChatGPT gaining over one million new users in under one hour, primarily due to the "biblical demand" (as Sam Altman described it) for ChatGPT-4o's Ghibli memes.

Sam Altman disclosed that OpenAI was forced to do a lot of unnatural things caused by the high demand for Ghibli memes, including temporary rate limits while it worked on enhancing efficiency. "Our GPUs are melting," lamented Altman.

It remains unclear if OpenAI has enough computing power to support the surge in demand for ChatGPT images if it sparks the interest of its massive user base. This is despite renewing its vows with Microsoft in a new definitive agreement, which allows it to get into deals with the likes of SoftBank, Oracle, and more to build more data centers than Microsoft could have.

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