On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said capacity issues related to OpenAI’s new image-generation tool will cause unspecified product delays.

As reported by Kyle Wiggers in TechCrunch (Sam Altman says that OpenAI’s capacity issues will cause product delays, available here), Altman said – in a series of posts on X on Monday – that “We are getting things under control, but you should expect new releases from OpenAI to be delayed, stuff to break, and for service to sometimes be slow as we deal with capacity challenges,” Altman wrote. “Working as fast we can to really get stuff humming.”

OpenAI’s new image-generation capability arrived with much fanfare — and controversy — for its impressive ability to recreate styles like Studio Ghibli’s hand-drawn animation. Over the weekend, Altman said in posts on X that the company “hasn’t been able to catch up” since launch and that staff have worked late nights and through the weekend to “keep the service up.”

In a single hour on Monday, ChatGPT added a million new users, Altman claimed in a post. ChatGPT now has 500 million weekly users and 20 million paying subscribers, up from 300 million users and 15.5 million subscribers at the end of 2024.

In an effort to ease its capacity issues, OpenAI delayed the release of the image-generation tool for free ChatGPT users and temporarily disabled video generation for new users of Sora, the company’s suite of generative AI media tools.

As for “keeping the service up” in the midst of capacity issues, my personal experience is that they have struggled mightily. I tried numerous times over several days to create an image related to this post where I asked ChatGPT to create an image of “a robot lawyer holding a document that says ‘Protective Order’” without success. When I tried again this morning, I finally got an image generated (it took a really long time, btw):

Where are the colors? This seems like a generation using sepia tones. Not sure why, and not that impressive. I do know that some people are getting some good results (wait until you see this week’s Kitchen Sink!), but I’m unimpressed so far and may have to consider moving to a different image generator until OpenAI figures it out.

So, what do you think? Have you experienced capacity issues or image generation issues with ChatGPT lately? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4o’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot lawyer looking out over a vast colorful landscape”. Took two tries and (again) highly underwhelming. 😩

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