About a week ago, OpenAI announced its newest image generator, building the GPT-4o image generator tool directly into ChatGPT and Sora. The service went viral immediately, with ChatGPT users generating tons of images in the following days.
An unfortunate Studio Ghibli-style trend followed, with ChatGPT users using the style for all sorts of images. The AI also helped them produce deepfakes featuring celebrities. All the while, OpenAI touted the services’ freedom and laxer safety rules while repeatedly mentioning the increased stress the OpenAI servers are under now that ChatGPT is being assaulted for image generation purposes.
Those remarks about GPUs melting had a double meaning. It suggested that some performance issues across other AI features would have to suffer, including the base ChatGPT chatbot functionalities. Meanwhile, users experienced ChatGPT issues, yours truly included.
ChatGPT was slower to respond at times and even failed to generate replies in the past few days. ChatGPT also went down following the intensive strain on the servers from users who might have signed up just to make Studio Ghibli images. And yes, ChatGPT Free users are able to use the 4o image generator, though limits are in place.
On Tuesday, Sam Altman took to X to address concerns about ChatGPT’s performance. He also said it will take a while for OpenAI to catch up to demand.
“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,” Sam Altman wrote on X. “Working as fast we can to really get stuff humming; if anyone has GPU capacity in 100k chunks we can get asap please call!”
The messages were sent on Tuesday as ChatGPT went down for many users in the US and UK. ChatGPT was down around 9 AM EST, around the same time similar issues occurred on Monday. ChatGPT went down on Wednesday at around 11 AM EST.
Interestingly, Altman announced that ChatGPT Free users will get access to the new image generator on Monday evening.
As a paying ChatGPT Plus user, this isn’t what I signed up for. I expect issues to happen occasionally, and I’ve witnessed downtime issues with ChatGPT in the past. But it wasn’t because a bunch of people can’t stop generating images for no real reason.
During one instance when ChatGPT went down for me, I found OpenAI’s status page and subscribed to it to receive notifications about issues that might impact the ChatGPT experience.
I checked out the service on Wednesday and found that ChatGPT has encountered issues consistently since the 4o image generation service was released. It’s not a coincidence. Look at the image above, where each bar represents a day. There’s hardly been a green bar in the ChatGPT performance tracker since 4o image generation came out.
Sam Altman did tease recently that ChatGPT signed up one million users in one hour. I said at the time that we can’t necessarily verify those figures. But Reuters says that data from market research firm Similarweb proves ChatGPT has gone viral.
The service surpassed 150 million active weekly users, a new record for ChatGPT. The service had about 145 million active weekly users before the 4o image generation product dropped.
ChatGPT went viral just when OpenAI needed it to. The company just conducted another round of funding, raising some $40 billion in new capital at a valuation of $300 billion. Of that new money, $10 billion is available right away. Also, $10 billion of the remaining balance is contingent on OpenAI becoming a for-profit company by the year’s end.
While the extra cash should help OpenAI improve its infrastructure to handle the additional stress, it won’t happen overnight. Unfortunately, that means we might continue to see ChatGPT performance issues for at least as long as Studio Ghibli images remain popular with users.
There’s no sign of that happening anytime soon. Soon after posing the reassurance above that OpenAI is handling the performance issues and ChatGPT downtimes, Altman took to X to post another Ghibli-styled AI image, but not before teasing that “y’all are not ready for images v2…” Yes, we are not ready, and maybe OpenAI should refrain from launching anything image- and video-related until its servers catch up with demand.
