ChatGPT's viral image creator is 'melting' OpenAI's GPUs
What's the story
OpenAI, the AI research lab behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT, has temporarily restricted image generation requests amid overwhelming demand.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, announced the decision on X (formerly Twitter), saying "it's super fun seeing people love images in ChatGPT, but our GPUs are melting."
He didn't reveal specific details about the rate limit but hoped it would be a short-term measure as they work to enhance efficiency.
Twitter Post
Twitter Post
it's super fun seeing people love images in chatgpt.
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 27, 2025
but our GPUs are melting.
we are going to temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. hopefully won't be long!
chatgpt free tier will get 3 generations per day soon.
Impact
Demand surge leads to restrictions
The spike in demand for ChatGPT's image generation capabilities has already prompted OpenAI to postpone the feature's availability for users on the free tier.
But, that alone didn't do much to alleviate the pressure on OpenAI's infrastructure.
Altman noted that free users will soon be able to generate up to three images per day, suggesting that the company is still working to balance demand with capacity.
Tech upgrade
System is currently incorrectly blocking some outputs: Altman
Altman has acknowledged that their system is currently incorrectly blocking some outputs and stated the company is working to resolve these issues.
This comes after a user recently reported that ChatGPT's image tool generated images of sexy men but not sexy women.
OpenAI is using its GPT-4o model for the improved image generation tool in ChatGPT. The new model has made generated images much more realistic and fixed previous problems like text rendering.