News: 0176842509

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OpenAI Says 'Our GPUs Are Melting' As It Limits ChatGPT Image Generation Requests

(Friday March 28, 2025 @12:30AM (BeauHD) from the fun-while-it-lasted dept.)


Following OpenAI's [1]viral Studio Ghibli moment , CEO Sam Altman says it has [2]temporarily limited image generation in ChatGPT due to the overwhelming demand on its GPU infrastructure. "It's super fun seeing people love images in ChatGPT, but our GPUs are melting," he [3]posted on X today. The Verge reports:

> The demand crunch already caused the artificial intelligence company to push back availability of the built-in image generator for users on ChatGPT's free tier. But apparently that measure alone wasn't enough to ease the stress on OpenAI's infrastructure. (Altman said free users will "soon" be able to generate up to three images per day.)



[1] https://slashdot.org/story/25/03/27/0023207/openais-viral-studio-ghibli-moment-highlights-ai-copyright-concerns

[2] https://www.theverge.com/news/637542/chatgpt-says-our-gpus-are-melting-as-it-puts-limit-on-image-generation-requests

[3] https://x.com/sama/status/1905296867145154688?s=46



Connectors melt, GPUs burn up (Score:3)

by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 )

Even a child knows that.

Re: (Score:3)

by battingly ( 5065477 )

Even a child knows he was using a metaphor.

Re: (Score:2)

by dsgrntlxmply ( 610492 )

OpenAI -> OvenAI

Re: (Score:2)

by Powercntrl ( 458442 )

> Even a child knows he was using a metaphor.

Kid: "What's a metaphor?"

Me: "They run Facebook."

"but our GPUs are melting" (Score:1)

by davidwr ( 791652 )

[AI-generated] pics [of the GPUs melting, Salvador Dali-style] or it didn't happen!

Lack of reverence for freebies (Score:2)

by seoras ( 147590 )

I'm on a paid tier and I re-sell their AI through my software as a service to my user base.

Things haven't been great since the end of January going from almost 100% response rate to API requests to an irritating daily lump of timeouts and failed completions where their API returns garbage, nothing at all or some cloud server error from their end.

Interesting seeing that post today as I've seen no errors for 2 days now so hopefully they've got a handle on it.

Giving away free is cool, I've done it myself, but

Re: (Score:3)

by Un-Thesis ( 700342 )

Since the image thing went viral, my own ChatGPT o3 API endpoints were suffering 10-25% failure rates from ~12 Noon to 4 PM EDT. E.g., Lunch breaks throughout America.

For the last day, error rates are back down to < 1%.

Why don't they have proper rate-limiting in place anyway? Image generation shouldn't shut down text generation.

Re: (Score:2)

by blue trane ( 110704 )

If you're not even generating enough heat to power a closed-circuit cooling system, are you willfully exaggerating if you say your gpus are melting?

Anyone else reminded of how cell phone companies at the beginning charged for each text because supply was so limited, except now it's unlimited?

It's super fun (Score:1)

by diffract ( 7165501 )

except for the guy they killed before he was able to leak OpenAI's secrets

Cue the ... (Score:2)

by PPH ( 736903 )

... Wicked Witch of the West.

I feel like I'm missing out on this (Score:2)

by Powercntrl ( 458442 )

I guess we've hit critical mass when there's enough paid users bogging down the servers. A similar thing happened with Suno, too. I was having a blast making AI generated songs, then they released a newer model (and it was [1]significantly improved [youtube.com]) but they stuck it behind a paywall after you burned through your free credits.

I'd like to say that in hindsight I should've taken a more lucrative career path, but if I had the ability to give my past self advice, it would've just been to hoard a bunch of Bitcoin

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xlOjHhNjHg

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