The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, noted in a series of posts on X on Monday that the popularity of the company's newly launched image generation tool, ChatGPT, will lead to unspecified product delays.

"We are managing the situation, but you should expect that new versions from OpenAI may be delayed, issues may arise, and services could occasionally be slow due to capacity challenges," wrote Altman. "We are working as fast as we can to make everything run smoothly."

OpenAI's new image generation feature gained significant attention and sparked controversy right after its release because of its impressive ability to replicate styles such as those seen in Studio Ghibli hand-drawn animations. Over the weekend, Altman mentioned in a post on X that since the launch, the company has been struggling to keep up. Employees have been working overtime, even on weekends, to "maintain service operations."

In one of his posts, Altman claimed that ChatGPT added one million new users in just one hour on Monday. Currently, ChatGPT boasts 500 million weekly active users and 20 million paid subscribers, up from 300 million users and 15.5 million paid subscribers at the end of 2024.

To ease capacity concerns, OpenAI has postponed the rollout of the image generation tool for free ChatGPT users and temporarily disabled the video generation feature for new users of Sora, the company’s generative AI media toolkit.