The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, announced on Wednesday that the rollout of ChatGPT's built-in image generator to free users has been postponed. He admitted that the popularity of this image generation tool exceeded expectations.

Just on Tuesday, OpenAI introduced an image generation feature to ChatGPT, allowing users to create images directly within the app using the company’s GPT-4o model. Since its launch, social media platforms have been flooded with images generated in the style of Hayao Miyazaki, a trend that even caught Altman’s attention and participation.

GPT-4o brings improvements in text rendering and uses an "autoregressive approach" for image generation, where images are progressively created from left to right and top to bottom instead of being generated all at once. Currently, this feature is only available to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team subscribers, with no clear timeline for when free users will gain access.