OpenAI launched a brand new flagship picture technology mannequin as we speak because it strikes to counter latest considerations that it’s slipping behind rivals within the race to seize each shopper and enterprise mindshare.
The brand new picture technology mannequin permits for extra exact picture enhancing and might generate photos as much as 4 instances sooner than OpenAI’s earlier picture creation AI, the corporate mentioned in a weblog submit. It mentioned the brand new mannequin, in addition to a brand new photos function in ChatGPT are designed to make picture technology “pleasant.”
In keeping with an OpenAI weblog submit, the brand new ChatGPT Photographs is rolling out to all ChatGPT customers and API customers globally as we speak. The corporate mentioned it really works throughout fashions, so customers don’t want to pick a selected mannequin within the drop-down menu to be able to use it.
“We consider we’re nonetheless in the beginning of what picture technology can allow,” the corporate mentioned within the weblog submit. “In the present day’s replace is a significant step ahead with extra to return, from finer-grained edits to richer, extra detailed outputs throughout languages.”
Whereas it could look like a Christmas current for loyal ChatGPT customers, OpenAI staffers have been the busy elves responding to Santa—er, CEO—Sam Altman’s post-Thanksgiving “Code Pink” memo, which was meant to push the corporate to enhance ChatGPT over the following eight weeks amid intense competitors from rivals, most notably Google.
Google’s Gemini mannequin had been gaining steam after its picture technology mannequin, Nano Banana, was launched in August. Google mentioned month-to-month lively customers grew from 450 million in July to 650 million in October.
The corporate’s newest model, Nano Banana Professional, went viral after its November 20 launch, because of the mannequin’s newfound capability to deal with textual content in photos cleanly (one thing that had been a thorny downside for years). Customers had been additionally wowed by Nano Banana Professional’s capability to provide diagrams and infographics that made sense, and the truth that it allowed individuals to edit their photos slightly than regenerating them from scratch.
Final week, OpenAI launched the newest model of its textual content mannequin, GPT-5.2; since then, industry-watchers have waited to see if the corporate would launch a brand new picture mannequin earlier than the New Yr. However will or not it’s adequate to outpace Google?
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of functions, wrote in a Substack submit that ChatGPT’s chat interface was not initially designed to transcend textual content, so the brand new picture mannequin is accompanied by a “devoted entrypoint” in ChatGPT for photos that works extra like a “inventive studio,” out there within the sidebar by way of the cell app and on the net.
“The brand new picture viewing and enhancing screens make it simpler to create photos that match your imaginative and prescient or get inspiration from trending prompts and preset filters,” she wrote. “On high of that, our new mannequin is quicker and higher at following detailed directions so that you get extra correct edits and artistic transformations.” The mannequin can hold key parts like lighting, composition, and likeness constant between what customers enter and what the mannequin outputs, “so the outcomes keep a lot nearer to what you imagined,” she added.
Nonetheless, Nano Banana Professional should still have an early mindshare benefit. In a latest interview with Fortune, Allie Miller, an AI advisor and investor, mentioned how she lately attended a Shark Tank-type occasion hosted by Mark Cuban and was struck by what occurred when Cuban mentioned the phrases “Nano Banana.”
She anticipated that the point out of Google’s whimsically-named AI picture generator may trigger confusion among the many hundreds of individuals within the viewers, who Miller described as largely new to AI. As an alternative, the gang nodded in recognition.
Like ChatGPT itself, she defined, “there are specific AI instruments or fashions that you simply simply begin listening to over and time and again that acquire such an enormous popular culture second.”
Whether or not OpenAI’s elves could make its new ChatGPT Photographs as irresistible as essentially the most sought-after toys of the season stays to be seen. However the second—coming amid the corporate’s Code Pink—underscores a broader actuality: Whereas mannequin high quality nonetheless issues within the AI race, it’s more and more a battle for shopper hearts and minds.
