OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced Wednesday that the rollout of ChatGPT’s highly anticipated AI image feature to free users has been delayed due to overwhelming demand.
“Images in ChatGPT are wayyyy more popular than we expected (and we had pretty high expectations),” Altman stated in a post on X.
The delay follows OpenAI’s announcement on Tuesday of GPT-4o’s native image generation capabilities, which allow users to upload and modify images. While the company initially planned to extend the feature to all ChatGPT users, it is currently available only to subscribers of ChatGPT Pro, Plus, and Teams.
This is not the first time OpenAI has encountered delays in product rollouts due to resource limitations. In December, the company temporarily halted signups for its text-to-video model, Sora, citing insufficient computing capacity. OpenAI has frequently pointed to infrastructure constraints as a challenge in meeting demand for its AI innovations.
The company’s ambitious $500 billion Stargate data center project, currently in the planning stages, may eventually help address these capacity issues and support wider access to its AI tools.
