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), 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

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)

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.

So, I've long dreamed of building an AI-powered 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) 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.

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

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.

> 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

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/3lneuquczzs2...

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.

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

> 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.

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

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