Introducing Images 2.6

(openai.com)

50 points | by davidbarker 1 hour ago

15 comments

  • E-Reverance 12 minutes ago
    Still looks like an eyesore, I genuinely want to know if the engineers who work on the product don't notice it
  • sroussey 43 minutes ago
    https://chatgpt.com/share/6aebc6f8-d660-83e8-9cb3-49bdf8caa7...

    I guess I should have been careful about “half”?

    These models have a hard time imagining men with naturally blond hair getting grey.

    • minimaxir 36 minutes ago
      I would caution against using the webapp to test the quality of this new model because OpenAI does not indicate which image model and effort is being used to generate the image, to my continued frustration.

      That said, I gave it one of my more difficult image prompts and the model now surprisingly passes (without plagiaristic cheating): https://chatgpt.com/share/6aebcbcd-6b8c-83e8-b52b-dbedf20ce4...

      • xp84 11 minutes ago
        Wow. Are those the correct Pokemon and everything? Quite cool.
        • minimaxir 3 minutes ago
          Yes, the Pokemon are correct. Compare to my attempt a year ago with Nano Banana Pro, which plagiarized the images, didn't do interesting things with the background, and got 271 wrong: https://minimaxir.com/2025/12/nano-banana-pro/pokemongrid_hu...

          When I did a similar prompt with ChatGPT 2.0 it was worse, so interesting to see improvement.

    • apetresc 0 minutes ago
      That prompt seems almost deliberately obtuse. The natural phrasing would be “greying blonde hair”. If you described someone as having half-X, half-Y hair, I’d expect to see something like that image, too.
  • dllu 4 minutes ago
    The blog post says

    > Images 2.6 is available globally today in ChatGPT and Codex across all subscription tiers on desktop, mobile, and web.

    But I just updated my codex-cli to the latest version (still 0.166.0) and it is still unable to generate gifs. Very disappointing

  • bsboxe 12 minutes ago
    The input and output pricing per token remains the same between 2.5 and 2.6, although using their image pricing calculator shows a quadrupling of token usage at low and medium quality settings for 2.6. For e.g. at 1024x1024:

    2.5 low, 196 tokens, $0.006

    2.6 low, 823 tokens, $0.025

    2.5 med, 439 tokens, $0.013

    2.6 med, 1449 tokens, $0.043

    Interestingly, higher quality settings show no change in token usage between the models.

    • bnmathm 3 minutes ago
      Similar results for my workflow. And the Round art comes out significantly less round without prompt changes (more input tokens)

        Setting (1024x1024)   Tokens   Cost/image   Time
        2.5 medium              439     $0.014     12.0 s
        2.6 low                 824     $0.025      6.7 s
        2.6 medium            1,449     $0.044      7.9 s
        2.6 high              1,758     $0.053      8.9 s
  • minimaxir 47 minutes ago
    Using the grid trick for animations to generate the individual frames has been around for awhile and not specific to ChatGPT: I'm surprised it took this long for one of the official providers to make it explicit. However, adherence between frames is generally tricky, and even in the examples there is a lot of noise between frames although that could be due to compression.

    SVG support is interesting but I suspect shenanigans are afoot since that's not how image generation models work, and it would likely strip any SynthID watermarks. It's possible OpenAI has pipelined a raster-to-vector tool that does the conversion automatically. (I developed a similar pipeline and it works extremely well; I'll open source it at some point)

    EDIT: Per documentation, there is an explicit `output_format: "svg"`, and I am indeed correct there is raster-to-vector in play:

    > The API creates a reference image and uses it to produce the SVG. The quality setting controls that reference image. Decode data[0].b64_json as base64 and save the resulting UTF-8 XML bytes with a .svg extension.

    OpenAI claims 50% faster generation with Images 2.6 but curiously price is the same as Image 2.5.

  • jjcm 15 minutes ago
    I've been playing with it for the last hour or so. I immediately updated my platform to use both since 2.5 is my primary model (i run a prompt->design site).

    After playing with it for an hour, I'm rolling back 2.6-flare to 2.5-flare. I've found 2.6-flare specifically to be too simplistic in its approaches.

    Examples: https://diffui.ai/app/canvas/178db5d5-ff87-4b43-aa98-2897773...

    2.6-sunburst seems solid however.

  • momojo 20 minutes ago
    What's the state of the art for image gen? I'm far removed and pretty happy with the free Gemini tier but its notable to me that I rarely see boasting about being "the best image generator yet" and I wonder if that's because they're all just good enough?
    • scottyah 17 minutes ago
      It has to be Google, since OpenAI always compares to other companies when it feels its winning at some benchmarks. They didn't even compare on cost, speed, or any benchmarks at all.
      • Computer0 2 minutes ago
        How do you sensibly benchmark this product?
    • jjcm 15 minutes ago
      Depends on the use. For pics, nano banana still feels like the best. For designs/posters, gpt-image is king by a very large margin.
    • niwrad 13 minutes ago
      Generally depends on use case and style. Midjourney, Seedream, GPT Image are commonly regarded contenders IMO.
    • vunderba 6 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • tintor 13 minutes ago
    SVG? Who can generate a pelican on a bicycle?
  • rarisma 48 minutes ago
    FOUR BILLION IMAGES PER WEEK???
    • viraptor 16 minutes ago
      I wonder if there's some weird accounting going on, or if this is real. It would mean around 24M images an hour and that's in the area of "more images than anyone will see". It means there's lots of wasted automated effort in this process somewhere, even if we assume some creators will request 8x variants of their ideas.
    • fractorial 25 minutes ago
      How depressing.
    • keraf 24 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • Computer0 5 minutes ago
    The gifs really accentuate the artifacting, not sure I would've lead with that.
  • algoth1 25 minutes ago
    Can it finally do pixel art?
    • minimaxir 22 minutes ago
      That depends on your definition of pixel art. (people are exceptionally pedantic about this)

      With the right prompt engineering, it (and similar quality models) can indeed do relevant pixel art, but due to the existence of blotchiness/SynthID watermarks you'll need to do some sort of postprocessing regardless.

  • jansan 31 minutes ago
    Do they have an example of an SVG image created by the new model somewhere?
  • ipsum2 36 minutes ago
    Still has the gross artifacts (visible watermarking) that the other GPT-Image-2.* has. Google's Nano banana watermarking is practically invisible.

    SVG is cool though, I wonder how good it is.

  • solyin 3 minutes ago
    lol, I tried

    > Create a GIF where xkcd 2347 gets hit by an airliner like the twin towers and the pilot is AI

    and got a refusal.

    > We’re so sorry, but the image we created may violate our guardrails around violence.

  • angoragoats 5 minutes ago
    No, thanks. Fuck right off, Ram Altman.