6 ms·

Pricing-wise, this API is going to be hard to justify the value unless you really can get value out of providing references. A generated `medium` 1024x1024 is $

Pricing-wise, this API is going to be hard to justify the value unless you really can get value out of providing references. A generated `medium` 1024x1024 is $0.04/image, which is in the same cost class as Imagen 3 and Flux 1.1 Pro. Testing from their new playground (https://platform.openai.com/playground/images https://platform.openai.com/playground/images), the medium images are indeed lower quality than either of of two competitor models and still takes 15+ seconds to generate: https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1915114021466017830 https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1915114021466017830 Prompting the model is also substantially more different and difficult than traditional models, unsurprisingly given the way the model works. The traditional image tricks don't work out-of-the-box and I'm struggling to get something that works without significant prompt augmentation (which is what I suspect was used for the ChatGPT image generations)

tough 2y ago
It seems to me like this is a new hybrid product for -vibe coders- beacuse otherwise the -wrapping- of prompting/improving a prompt with an LLM before hitting the text2image model can certainly be done as you say cheaper if you just run it yourself. maybe OpenAI thinks model business is over and they need to start sherlocking all the way from the top to final apps (Thus their interest on buying out cursor, finally ending up with windsurf) Idk this feels like a new offering between a full raw API and a final product where you abstract some of it for a few cents, and they're basically bundling their SOTA llm models with their image models for extra margin
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  > It seems to me like this is a new hybrid product for -vibe coders- beacuse otherwise the -wrapping- of prompting/improving a prompt with an LLM before hitting the text2image model can certainly be done as you say cheaper if you just run it yourself. In case you didn’t know, it’s not just wrapping in an LLM. The image model they’re referencing is a model that’s directly integrated into the LLM for functionality. It’s not possible to extract, because the LLM outputs tokens which are part of the image itself. That said, they’re definitely trying to focus on building products over raw models now. They want to be a consumer subscription instead of commodity model provider.
  - tough 2y ago
    Right! I forgot the new model was a multi-modal one generating image outputs from both image and text inputs, i guess this is good and price will come down eventually. waiting for some FOSS multi-modal model to come out eventually too great to see openAI expanding into making actual usable products i guess
  - spilldahill 2y ago
    yeah, the integration is the real shift here. by embedding image generation into the LLM’s token stream, it’s no longer a pipeline of separate systems but a single unified model interface. that unlocks new use cases where you can reason, plan, and render all in one flow. it’s not just about replacing diffusion models, it’s about making generation part of a broader agentic loop. pricing will drop over time, but the shift in how you build with this is the more interesting part.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
It's far and away the most powerful image model right now. $0.04/image is a decent price!
- arevno 2y ago
  This is extremely domain-specific. Diffusion models work much better for certain things.
  - thot_experiment 2y ago
    Can you cite an example? I'm really curious where that set of usecases lies.
    - koakuma-chan 2y ago
      Explicit adult content.
      - thot_experiment 2y ago
        False. That has nothing to do with the model architecture and everything to do with cloud inference providers wanting to avoid regulatory scrutiny.
    - echelon 2y ago
      I work in the space. There are a lot of use cases that get censored by OpenAI, Kling, Runway, and various other providers for a wide variety of reasons: - OpenAI is notorious for blocking copyrighted characters. They do prompt keyword scanning, but also run a VLM on the results so you can't "trick" the model. - Lots of providers block public figures and celebrities. - Various providers block LGBT imagery, even safe for work prompts. Kling is notorious for this. - I was on a sales call with someone today who runs a father's advocacy group. I don't know what system he was using, but he said he found it impossible to generate an adult male with a child. In a totally safe for work context. - Some systems block "PG-13" images of characters that are in bathing suits or scantily clad. None of this is porn, mind you.
simonw 2y ago
It may lose against other models on prompt-to-image, but I'd be very excited to see another model that's as good at this one as image+prompt-to-image. Editing photos with ChatGPT over the past few weeks has been SO much fun. Here's my dog in a pelican costume: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lneuquczzs2i https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lneuquczzs2...
- steve_adams_86 2y ago
  The dog ChatGPT generated doesn't actually look like your dog. The eyes are so different. Really cute image, though.
furyofantares 2y ago
I find prompting the model substantially easier than traditional models, is it really more difficult or are you just used to traditional models? I suspect what I'll do with the API is iterate at medium quality and then generate a high quality image when I'm done.
thot_experiment 2y ago
Similarly to how 90% of my LLM needs are met by Mistral 3.1, there's no reason to use 4o for most t2i or i2i, however there's a definite set of tasks that are not possible with diffusion models, or if they are they require a giant ball of node spaghetti in comfyui to achieve. The price is high but the likelyhood of getting the right answer on the first try is absolutely worth the cost imo.
Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
> A generated `medium` 1024x1024 is $0.04/image It's actually more than that. It's about 16.7 cents per image. $0.04/image is the pricing for DALL-E 3.
- weird-eye-issue 2y ago
  No, it's not
- mkl 2y ago
  16.7 cents is the high quality cost, and medium is 4.2 cents: https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing#:~:text=1M%20characters-,Image%20generation,-Price/image https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing#:~:text=1M%20charac...
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    Ah, they changed that page since I saw it yesterday. They didn't show low/med/high quality, they just said an image was a certain number of tokens with a price per token that led to $0.16/image.
raincole 2y ago
ChatGPT's prompt adherence is light years ahead of all the others. I won't even call Flux/Midjoueny its competitors. ChatGPT image gen is practically a one-of-its-kind unique product on the market: the only usable AI image editor for people without image editing experience. I think in terms of image generation, ChatGPT is the biggest leap since Stable Diffusion's release. LoRA/ControlNet/Flux are forgettable in comparison.
- soared 2y ago
  This is a take so incredulous it doesn’t seem credible.
  - tacoooooooo 2y ago
    its 100% the correct take
    - fkyoureadthedoc 2y ago
      yeah this is my personal experience. The new image generation is the only reason I keep an OpenAI subscription rather than switching to Google.
  - mediaman 2y ago
    It is correct, the shift from diffusion to transformers is a very, very big difference.
  - stavros 2y ago
    I can confirm, ChatGPT's prompt adherence is so incredibly good, it gets even really small details right, to a level that diffusion-based generators couldn't even dream of.
  - abhpro 2y ago
    Also chiming in to say you're wrong, I mean they're correct
- thegeomaster 2y ago
adamhowell 2y ago
So, I've long dreamed of building an AI-powered https://iconfinder.com https://iconfinder.com. I started Accomplice v1 back in 2021 with this goal in mind and raised some VC money but it was too early. Now, with these latest imagen-3.0-generate-002 (Gemini) and gpt-image-1 (OpenAI) models – especially this API release from OpenAI – I've been able to resurrect Accomplice as a little side project. Accomplice v2 (https://accomplice.ai https://accomplice.ai) is just getting started back up again – I honestly decided to rebuild it only a couple weeks ago in preparation for today once I saw ChatGPT's new image model – but so far 1,000s of free to download PNGs (and any SVGs that have already been vectorized are free too (costs a credit to vectorize)). I generate new icons every few minutes from a huge list of "useful icons" I've built. Will be 100% pay-as-you-go. And for a credit, paid users can vectorize any PNGs they like, tweak them using AI, upload their own images to vectorize and download, or create their own icons (with my prompt injections baked in to get you good icon results) Do multi-modal models make something like this obsolete? I honestly am not sure. In my experience with Accomplice v1, a lot of users didn't know what to do with a blank textarea, so the thinking here is there's value in doing some of the work for them upfront with a large searchable archive. Would love to hear others' thoughts. But I'm having fun again either way.
- stavros 2y ago
  That looks interesting, but I don't know how useful single icons can be. For me, the really useful part would be to get a suite of icons that all have a consistent visual style. Bonus points if I can prompt the model to generate more icons with that same style.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    Recraft has a style feature where you give some images. I wonder if that would work for icons. You can also try giving an image of a bunch of icons to ChatGPT and have it generate more, then vectorize them.
    - stavros 2y ago
      I think the latter approach is the best bet right now, agree.
varenc 2y ago
pretty amazing that in ~two years a 15 second latency AI image generation API that cost 4 cents lags behind competitors.
- echelon 2y ago
  This product does not lag behind competitors. Once you take the time to understand how it works, it's clear that this is an order of magnitude more powerful than anything else on the market. While there's a market need for fast diffusion, that's already been filled and is now a race to the bottom. There's nobody else that can do what OpenAI does with gpt-image-1. This model is a truly programmable graphics workflow engine. And this type of model has so much more value than mere "image generation". gpt-image-1 replaces ComfyUI, inpainting/outpainting, LoRAs, and in time one could imagine it replaces Adobe Photoshop and nearly all the things people use it for. It's an image manipulation engine, not just a diffusion model. It understands what you want on the first try, and it does a remarkably good job at it. gpt-image-1 is a graphics design department in a box. Please don't think of this as a model where you prompt things like "a dog and a cat hugging". This is so much more than that.
vunderba 2y ago
> Prompting the model is also substantially more different and difficult than traditional models Can you elaborate? This was not my experience - retesting the prompts that I used for my GenAI image shootout against gpt-image-1 API proved largely similar. https://genai-showdown.specr.net https://genai-showdown.specr.net
Wowfunhappy 2y ago
Huh? For me the quality of the API seems to be identical to what I'm getting in ChatGPT.

tough 2y ago

It seems to me like this is a new hybrid product for -vibe coders- beacuse otherwise the -wrapping- of prompting/improving a prompt with an LLM before hitting the text2image model can certainly be done as you say cheaper if you just run it yourself. maybe OpenAI thinks model business is over and they need to start sherlocking all the way from the top to final apps (Thus their interest on buying out cursor, finally ending up with windsurf) Idk this feels like a new offering between a full raw API and a final product where you abstract some of it for a few cents, and they're basically bundling their SOTA llm models with their image models for extra margin

vineyardmike 2y ago
> It seems to me like this is a new hybrid product for -vibe coders- beacuse otherwise the -wrapping- of prompting/improving a prompt with an LLM before hitting the text2image model can certainly be done as you say cheaper if you just run it yourself. In case you didn’t know, it’s not just wrapping in an LLM. The image model they’re referencing is a model that’s directly integrated into the LLM for functionality. It’s not possible to extract, because the LLM outputs tokens which are part of the image itself. That said, they’re definitely trying to focus on building products over raw models now. They want to be a consumer subscription instead of commodity model provider.
- tough 2y ago
  Right! I forgot the new model was a multi-modal one generating image outputs from both image and text inputs, i guess this is good and price will come down eventually. waiting for some FOSS multi-modal model to come out eventually too great to see openAI expanding into making actual usable products i guess
- spilldahill 2y ago
  yeah, the integration is the real shift here. by embedding image generation into the LLM’s token stream, it’s no longer a pipeline of separate systems but a single unified model interface. that unlocks new use cases where you can reason, plan, and render all in one flow. it’s not just about replacing diffusion models, it’s about making generation part of a broader agentic loop. pricing will drop over time, but the shift in how you build with this is the more interesting part.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

It's far and away the most powerful image model right now. $0.04/image is a decent price!

arevno 2y ago
This is extremely domain-specific. Diffusion models work much better for certain things.
- thot_experiment 2y ago
  Can you cite an example? I'm really curious where that set of usecases lies.
  - koakuma-chan 2y ago
    Explicit adult content.
    - thot_experiment 2y ago
      False. That has nothing to do with the model architecture and everything to do with cloud inference providers wanting to avoid regulatory scrutiny.
  - echelon 2y ago
    I work in the space. There are a lot of use cases that get censored by OpenAI, Kling, Runway, and various other providers for a wide variety of reasons: - OpenAI is notorious for blocking copyrighted characters. They do prompt keyword scanning, but also run a VLM on the results so you can't "trick" the model. - Lots of providers block public figures and celebrities. - Various providers block LGBT imagery, even safe for work prompts. Kling is notorious for this. - I was on a sales call with someone today who runs a father's advocacy group. I don't know what system he was using, but he said he found it impossible to generate an adult male with a child. In a totally safe for work context. - Some systems block "PG-13" images of characters that are in bathing suits or scantily clad. None of this is porn, mind you.

simonw 2y ago

It may lose against other models on prompt-to-image, but I'd be very excited to see another model that's as good at this one as image+prompt-to-image. Editing photos with ChatGPT over the past few weeks has been SO much fun. Here's my dog in a pelican costume: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lneuquczzs2i https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lneuquczzs2...

steve_adams_86 2y ago
The dog ChatGPT generated doesn't actually look like your dog. The eyes are so different. Really cute image, though.

furyofantares 2y ago

I find prompting the model substantially easier than traditional models, is it really more difficult or are you just used to traditional models? I suspect what I'll do with the API is iterate at medium quality and then generate a high quality image when I'm done.

thot_experiment 2y ago

Similarly to how 90% of my LLM needs are met by Mistral 3.1, there's no reason to use 4o for most t2i or i2i, however there's a definite set of tasks that are not possible with diffusion models, or if they are they require a giant ball of node spaghetti in comfyui to achieve. The price is high but the likelyhood of getting the right answer on the first try is absolutely worth the cost imo.

Sohcahtoa82 2y ago

> A generated `medium` 1024x1024 is $0.04/image It's actually more than that. It's about 16.7 cents per image. $0.04/image is the pricing for DALL-E 3.

weird-eye-issue 2y ago
No, it's not
mkl 2y ago
16.7 cents is the high quality cost, and medium is 4.2 cents: https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing#:~:text=1M%20characters-,Image%20generation,-Price/image https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing#:~:text=1M%20charac...
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  Ah, they changed that page since I saw it yesterday. They didn't show low/med/high quality, they just said an image was a certain number of tokens with a price per token that led to $0.16/image.

raincole 2y ago

ChatGPT's prompt adherence is light years ahead of all the others. I won't even call Flux/Midjoueny its competitors. ChatGPT image gen is practically a one-of-its-kind unique product on the market: the only usable AI image editor for people without image editing experience. I think in terms of image generation, ChatGPT is the biggest leap since Stable Diffusion's release. LoRA/ControlNet/Flux are forgettable in comparison.

soared 2y ago
This is a take so incredulous it doesn’t seem credible.
- tacoooooooo 2y ago
  its 100% the correct take
  - fkyoureadthedoc 2y ago
    yeah this is my personal experience. The new image generation is the only reason I keep an OpenAI subscription rather than switching to Google.
- mediaman 2y ago
  It is correct, the shift from diffusion to transformers is a very, very big difference.
- stavros 2y ago
  I can confirm, ChatGPT's prompt adherence is so incredibly good, it gets even really small details right, to a level that diffusion-based generators couldn't even dream of.
- abhpro 2y ago
  Also chiming in to say you're wrong, I mean they're correct
thegeomaster 2y ago

adamhowell 2y ago

So, I've long dreamed of building an AI-powered https://iconfinder.com https://iconfinder.com. I started Accomplice v1 back in 2021 with this goal in mind and raised some VC money but it was too early. Now, with these latest imagen-3.0-generate-002 (Gemini) and gpt-image-1 (OpenAI) models – especially this API release from OpenAI – I've been able to resurrect Accomplice as a little side project. Accomplice v2 (https://accomplice.ai https://accomplice.ai) is just getting started back up again – I honestly decided to rebuild it only a couple weeks ago in preparation for today once I saw ChatGPT's new image model – but so far 1,000s of free to download PNGs (and any SVGs that have already been vectorized are free too (costs a credit to vectorize)). I generate new icons every few minutes from a huge list of "useful icons" I've built. Will be 100% pay-as-you-go. And for a credit, paid users can vectorize any PNGs they like, tweak them using AI, upload their own images to vectorize and download, or create their own icons (with my prompt injections baked in to get you good icon results) Do multi-modal models make something like this obsolete? I honestly am not sure. In my experience with Accomplice v1, a lot of users didn't know what to do with a blank textarea, so the thinking here is there's value in doing some of the work for them upfront with a large searchable archive. Would love to hear others' thoughts. But I'm having fun again either way.

stavros 2y ago
That looks interesting, but I don't know how useful single icons can be. For me, the really useful part would be to get a suite of icons that all have a consistent visual style. Bonus points if I can prompt the model to generate more icons with that same style.
- throwup238 2y ago
  Recraft has a style feature where you give some images. I wonder if that would work for icons. You can also try giving an image of a bunch of icons to ChatGPT and have it generate more, then vectorize them.
  - stavros 2y ago
    I think the latter approach is the best bet right now, agree.

varenc 2y ago

pretty amazing that in ~two years a 15 second latency AI image generation API that cost 4 cents lags behind competitors.

echelon 2y ago
This product does not lag behind competitors. Once you take the time to understand how it works, it's clear that this is an order of magnitude more powerful than anything else on the market. While there's a market need for fast diffusion, that's already been filled and is now a race to the bottom. There's nobody else that can do what OpenAI does with gpt-image-1. This model is a truly programmable graphics workflow engine. And this type of model has so much more value than mere "image generation". gpt-image-1 replaces ComfyUI, inpainting/outpainting, LoRAs, and in time one could imagine it replaces Adobe Photoshop and nearly all the things people use it for. It's an image manipulation engine, not just a diffusion model. It understands what you want on the first try, and it does a remarkably good job at it. gpt-image-1 is a graphics design department in a box. Please don't think of this as a model where you prompt things like "a dog and a cat hugging". This is so much more than that.

vunderba 2y ago

> Prompting the model is also substantially more different and difficult than traditional models Can you elaborate? This was not my experience - retesting the prompts that I used for my GenAI image shootout against gpt-image-1 API proved largely similar. https://genai-showdown.specr.net https://genai-showdown.specr.net

Wowfunhappy 2y ago

Huh? For me the quality of the API seems to be identical to what I'm getting in ChatGPT.