March 27, 2025 – OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to X today to acknowledge that the popularity of the image generation tool in ChatGPT has far exceeded expectations, leading to a postponement in the rollout plan for free users.
Just yesterday, OpenAI hosted a live stream to announce a major upgrade to GPT-4o’s native image generation capabilities. Altman himself demonstrated the creation of memes, text-to-image rendering, multi-round interactive generation, and instruction following during the event.
Additionally, OpenAI has integrated a text-to-image feature into ChatGPT. Following its launch, a surge of users quickly began transforming their photos into AI-generated images in the style of Studio Ghibli, flooding various platforms with these creations. Even Altman himself joined in on the trend.
GPT-4o has undergone optimizations in text rendering and employs an “autoregressive approach” for image generation, building the scene step by step from left to right and top to bottom. It’s worth noting that this feature is currently only available to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team subscribers, with no clear timeline for when it will be accessible to free users.
