- OpenAI limits free tier of ChatGPT to 3 images a day
- Sam Altman says “Our GPUs are melting”
- Limitation should be on a temporary basis
Amid the growing controversy over its AI mimicking the artistic style of Studio Ghibli, OpenAI is being forced to limit how many images ChatGPT can produce on the free tier to 3 a day because it’s proving too popular.
In a recent tweet on X, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said “It’s super fun seeing people love images in ChatGPT, 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.”
it’s super fun seeing people love images in chatgpt.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.March 27, 2025
ChatGPT’s new image generation capabilities are clearly a step up in the development of AI image generation, proving superior in our tests to DALL-E 3, which is the model previously used by ChatGPT, and also what it will still default to once you’ve run out of generations in the new model.
In his X-thread Sam Altman also goes on to say that “(also, we are refusing some generations that should be allowed; we are fixing these as fast we can.)”
This could explain the frustrations I’ve been experiencing getting ChatGPT to produce text in images.
ChatGPT rollout delays
It’s quite possible that you don’t have access to ChatGPT’s image creation tools quite yet anyway. While ChatGPT Plus and Pro users all seem to have access, not all free-tier users do.
On March 26 Altman tweeted that rollout to the free tier was going to be delayed: “Images in ChatGPT are way more popular than we expected (and we had pretty high expectations). Rollout to our free tier is, unfortunately, going to be delayed for a while.”
As we’ve said in our testing, even on the Plus tier, ChatGPT is already very slow when it comes to generating images, and when the rollout to the free tier is complete we would expect it to be even slower. The move to limit the free tier to 3 images on a temporary basis, while understandable, will inevitably lead to people feeling frustrated with the company.
Have you been able to sample ChatGPT’s new image creation abilities yet? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
