OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on Wednesday that the rollout of ChatGPT’s viral new AI image features to free users would be delayed, citing significantly higher demand than the company expected.
“Images in ChatGPT are wayyyy more popular than we expected (and we had pretty high expectations),” Altman said in a post on X on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, the company announced the launch of GPT-4o’s native image generation, which lets users upload and modify images, saying it would soon come to all tiers of ChatGPT. As of Wednesday, OpenAI has only rolled out the feature to subscribers to ChatGPT Pro, Plus, and Teams.
In recent months, OpenAI has faced a similar hiccups around product launches, repeatedly blaming a lack of compute capacity. Shortly after launching Sora in December, OpenAI disabled signups. Perhaps, the company’s planned $500 billion Stargate data center project will help with those capacity constraints.
