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Images 2.6

137 points davidbarker 3 hours ago 96 comments

rarisma 3 hours ago | parent

FOUR BILLION IMAGES PER WEEK???

fractorial 2 hours ago | parent

How depressing.

viraptor 2 hours ago | parent

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.

post-it 1 hour ago | parent

I don't use AI image generation anymore, but when I was fiddling with it I would generate dozens of images per idea, limited only by my patience. "The same thing but a little different" is the easiest feedback you can give anything.

80fj0348i 1 hour ago | parent

Same, when I messed around with it to learn how the models worked I would generate batches of hundreds or thousands with slightly tweaked prompts and negative prompts to get a sense of how the inputs changed the outputs.

minimaxir 2 hours ago | parent

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.

bizer 35 minutes ago | parent

Image 2.6 costs more tokens for generating low and medium quality images, so it ends up being a bit more expensive. Could refer to https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/image-generati...

padolsey 25 minutes ago | parent

Yeh using sprites to make frames consistent (kinda tilting latent space towards a character consistency, zero-shot ~LoRA hack?) is old-school. I did this 3 years ago. https://j11y.io/dance/

vunderba 23 minutes ago | parent

From what I can tell after some preliminary testing, you have to pass an additional large language model to the OpenAI API when generating SVGs.

I couldn't find this requirement in the documentation, but if you don't pass one in, you get this error:

  400 {"message": "SVG generation requires 'svg.model'.",
     "param": "svg.model", "code": "missing_required_parameter"}
I tried it with Sunburst with both gpt-5.5 and gpt-5.6-sol, and the results were nothing spectacular. It’s something you could already do in the ChatGPT interface by asking it to convert an existing image to an equivalent SVG.

https://imgpb.com/bkUrc

Recraft is probably the only group I know of that had a native text-to-SVG generator pretty early on, but since it’s a closed model, I’m not familiar with what they were doing under the hood technically.

https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/recraft/v4/pro/text-to-vector

sroussey 2 hours ago | parent

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 2 hours ago | parent

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 2 hours ago | parent

Wow. Are those the correct Pokemon and everything? Quite cool.

minimaxir 2 hours ago | parent

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.

Computer0 2 hours ago | parent

On the back end a language model is effectively writing a long detailed prompt describing this image exactly right? The image model can't know this.

minimaxir 1 hour ago | parent

ChatGPT Images (and some others like Nano Banana) are autoregressive models, and the text model generates the tokens in the same way which are then passed in the correct form for an image model to decode. That is how it can reason the prime numbers + Pokemon + art style conditional.

It is different from earlier image models which just use a simple text encoder and struggle with conditional logic if not explicitly trained for it.

weird-eye-issue 1 hour ago | parent

Yes it thinks about it and then calls the image tool with the detailed prompt with exactly what to include in the image

apetresc 2 hours ago | parent

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.

ipsum2 2 hours ago | parent

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.

jansan 2 hours ago | parent

Do they have an example of an SVG image created by the new model somewhere?

minimaxir 2 hours ago | parent

Documentation has two: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/image-generati...

jrmg 2 hours ago | parent

It looks like the images in there are 'based' on the "hot springs symbol" - a Japanese map symbol encoded into Unicode that seems to have become synonymous with "piping hot bread" in the West!

https://emojipedia.org/hot-springs

phoghed 1 hour ago | parent

I always thought it was coffee like the Java logo lol

rprwhite 1 hour ago | parent

The images in the GPs link show a common pictogram for artisanal bread. The image itself is actually a close representation of the real thing. An image search for sourdough will return many images showing bread with a similar appearance. Anecdotally, I’ve never seen that hot springs symbol used for bread, and I’ve lived in the west my whole life. Not without irony, but connecting the bread symbol with the hot springs symbol feels like the sort of mistake an llm would make.

algoth1 2 hours ago | parent

Can it finally do pixel art?

minimaxir 2 hours ago | parent

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.

vunderba 2 hours ago | parent

If you define pixel art as just a vague overall look, then yes, it can do pixel art. If you define pixel art as being limited to a fixed color palette, like 16 or 256 colors and aligned to a square grid, then no, not without some manual post-processing.

It's not helped by the fact that a lot of people who are not artistically inclined will generate pixel art on these image generators at 1MP resolutions (far higher than traditional pixel art), such that even the casual observer can typically see the bad smearing and fringing in the final result.

Dwedit 1 hour ago | parent

There are SDXL pixel art models out there that do actual pixel art. They generate images that are 8x too large, you need to downscale them and reduce colors externally.

vunderba 1 hour ago | parent

yeah, the original Retro Diffusion models were an early example of that - IIRC it had models separately fine-tuned for 32x32, 64x64, etc. so you'd nearest neighbor squash'em down to that size after the initial gen to kill the high frequency noise.

momojo 2 hours ago | parent

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 2 hours ago | parent

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 hours ago | parent

How do you sensibly benchmark this product?

jjcm 2 hours ago | parent

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 2 hours ago | parent

Generally depends on use case and style. Midjourney, Seedream, GPT Image are commonly regarded contenders IMO.

vunderba 2 hours ago | parent

I've been running a comparative image benchmark site for years now (see my profile for the link), ever since SDXL back in 2023, and the answer really comes down to it depends. My benchmark focuses primarily on prompt adherence, but that's just one metric you can use. (fidelity, censorship, explorative, speed, features, etc are others)

In terms of overall state of the art, the two major contenders are probably Nano Banana Pro (Google) and the GPT Image 2 series (OpenAI).

For pure prompt adherency, OpenAI has consistently lead the pack since the original gpt-image-1 released back in March of 2025.... but its OpenAI's fidelity has always left something to be desired. Version 2 of the series has definitely closed the gap a bit.

jjcm 2 hours ago | parent

2.5 is better than 2.6

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 either be too simplistic in its approaches, or create outputs that are inherently broken in other cases.

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

2.6-sunburst seems solid however.

Update: seems to be confirmed on arena.ai - 2.5 scores higher than 2.6 https://arena.ai/leaderboard/image/text-to-image

Computer0 2 hours ago | parent

I preferred 2.6 in all examples supplied!

jjcm 2 hours ago | parent

I firmly disagree. There's subjective comparison, and there's objective comparison.

In two of the examples the images from 2.6 are inherently broken, ie: https://image.non.io/161d8f02-fc2a-40e0-91b2-9d27ceb8fef1.we...

Objectively there are tests here where 2.5 are better. Subjectively prefering the layout of 2.6 is fine, but there are blocking flaws.

jjcm 1 hour ago | parent

Update: based on info from design arena, it looks like gpt-image-2.6 was post-trained to output less text: https://x.com/DesignArena/status/2118124381155303918

This may be why text elements in particular appear more "zoomed in", and why it's providing less detail for UI design.

ChickeNES 1 hour ago | parent

Oh thank god, the awful inspirational text shoved needlessly into everything has been excised.

tintor 2 hours ago | parent

SVG? Who can generate a pelican on a bicycle?

E-Reverance 2 hours ago | parent

Still looks like an eyesore, I genuinely want to know if the engineers who work on the product don't notice it

cousin_it 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah, I've been mystified for years why they can't just train the "AI look" out of images. Is it, like, something undetectable by machine? But then how come we can often detect it so easily?

minimaxir 1 hour ago | parent

It's the opposite: the average person likes the AI look of images (the more "aesthetic" look) and RLHF keep converging toward that.

It is entirely possible to prompt engineer away from that style, but that requires effort and knowledge that said average person does not have, so it's stuck in a feedback loop.

0x4e 1 hour ago | parent

I still can’t believe the amount of deepfakes and slop I see just everywhere including food menus and people don’t even seem to notice.

This kind of content is here to stay and we’re going to see more and more of it. Unfortunately…

awesome_dude 37 minutes ago | parent

> people don’t even seem to notice.

I've been seeing "AI slop" stickers posted on things

> I see just everywhere including food menus

The places I have seen it in use are the places that would have a handwritten scribble that was misspelt and would be something mocked by people because it was written by ESOL (or vice versa, English speakers trying, but failing, to write in a different language)

Honestly, I think the AI slop is a step up - I can read the signs clearly, and they are only mildly offensive

Edit: I guess I take the view that - like a pirated movie filmed in a cinema - the only people that use/watch it are people that were never going to pay for the real thing anyway

smelendez 25 minutes ago | parent

People definitely seem to notice.

I see restaurants post AI flyers and ads to random local Facebook groups and most of the replies are about them being AI slop. I think it’s an uncanny valley problem: People don’t mind if you post a real photo of your food or a cartoon drawing of a pizza or a pig on a spit, but when it’s a weird fake photo with texture issues, it looks gross, especially when it’s food.

I think a lot of people who open restaurants probably aren’t extremely online, partly because it would be physically impossible with the amount of work they have to do, but they definitely pay attention -sometimes too much attention — to public online feedback.

ion_trapper 1 hour ago | parent

The saddest words of tongue or pen: “you’re not the target demographic”

casey2 1 hour ago | parent

No, you are confusing a model with reality.

toddmorey 29 minutes ago | parent

This is not true. Think of the problems AI has with creating appetizing food imagery, for example. Images that every human annotator marks as unappealing with a high degree of consensus.

The problem is in the rewards, but it's more how they average across domains and contexts, so AI misapplies them. Actually, in human preference evaluations, most of Gen Z in particular extremely adverse to the common look of AI images.

So it's not the annotators involved in RLHF, it's the models failing to map to human preferences at the task level. The failure rate is also uneven across domains.

Where there are challenges with human annotation, it's not the ability to gauge what's good but rather how to correct what's wrong. Most people can tell when something is off but struggle to articulate why. That's where more domain expertise is required.

Conscat 1 hour ago | parent

I think this is fundamental. People will probably dislike whatever it is that AI images look like, because whatever they look like is going to be associated with cheap. They could have a totally different aesthetic and I think most people's conception of cheap would adapt to whatever that is.

samuria 1 hour ago | parent

It does look terrible. But keep in mind these decisions aren't made to please you or me on HN. The numbers clearly show the average user does not care about the AI look because they can't really tell the difference between human-gen and AI-gen. Whatever saves them money is what they will go with.

singpolyma3 1 hour ago | parent

It's not like it's saving people money. Instead it's letting them create things they never could have before

quantummagic 30 minutes ago | parent

That stained glass sky-whale, at the bottom of the page, is pretty nice.

bsboxe 2 hours ago | parent

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 2 hours ago | parent

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

Computer0 2 hours ago | parent

The gifs really accentuate the artifacting, not sure I would've lead with that.

dllu 2 hours ago | parent

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

solyin 2 hours ago | parent

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.

Den_VR 1 hour ago | parent

“Is the topic and concept from the original clear?“

Follow by

“Make it”

Seems to resolve the refusals

solyin 1 hour ago | parent

Wow. Thanks!

https://solyin.com/dependency-ai.gif

Not sure what that says about grok, Claude, and runway flagging that and being unable to generate that, or me not having the prompting skills to do that without help.

shepherdjerred 1 hour ago | parent

...I tried a similar prompt today and it refused

schneehertz 2 hours ago | parent

The model used by codex-cli is still gpt-image-2. https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/f3074e35c079bd8a5e89b03...

DanHulton 2 hours ago | parent

That stained glass whale thing makes me especially grumpy. When it scrolled onto the page, my first thought was "whoah, what a neat idea" and then it was _immediately_ followed by "what a terribly execution."

Like, I'm not even an artist, so I'm sure there's a million things I'm missing, but it's just so upsetting to look at. There's weird random reflections on things that shouldn't have reflections, the coloured light absolutely doesn't actually track through the stained glass onto any surface that makes any sense, light is coming from every which way, it's just... gross to look at for anything more than a quarter of a second.

And this is what they're using to hype people up for it. /shrug

minimaxir 2 hours ago | parent

> There's weird random reflections on things that shouldn't have reflections

It's an image depicting a whale made of stained glass; realism is off the table there.

post-it 1 hour ago | parent

Well no. I can imagine lots of things in my head that are impossible but would be correctly lit, and I could do the same in Blender.

casey2 1 hour ago | parent

Not really, you could imagine another technique that 3D models it without force but with raytracing, puts it in that scene and takes a picture, the result would look better. That could then be a starting point for trying to get the lighting an panels just right to make the best reflections.

When you forgo process the odds that you'll make good art drop to 0. Tool use is a much better path forward for self driving, artistic computer than big data. Images 2.6 only has use as a tool.

phoghed 1 hour ago | parent

Unpleasable nerds with “I can tell by the pixels” ass comments is what keeps me coming back to HN year after year

Just an absolute race to post a contrarian take to hit the top of the comments.

Never change bros

Conscat 1 hour ago | parent

If not by the pixels, how else could you assess the quality of an image?

neom 1 hour ago | parent

Did a considerably worse job than Image Gen 2.0 on my standard test prompt.

"A macro close-up photograph of an old watchmaker's hands carefully replacing a tiny gear inside a vintage pocket watch. The watch mechanism is partially submerged in a shallow dish of clear water, causing visible refraction and light caustics across the brass gears. A single drop of water is falling from a pair of steel tweezers, captured mid-splash on the water's surface. Reflect the watchmaker's face, slightly distorted, in the curved glass of the watch face. Sharp focus throughout, natural window lighting from the left, shot on 100mm macro lens."

2.6: https://gov.f9.is/JRDpHJGu

2.0: https://gov.f9.is/cqyCwtq9

fernly 1 hour ago | parent

tweezers not holding the gear, and THOSE FINGERS, yick. What else?

cgbur 1 hour ago | parent

Whatever site you are hosting images seems to trap my mobile browser and require 3-4 back buttons to get out of.

neom 1 hour ago | parent

Hmm, it's jumpshare one of those drag and drop file share companies (that I pay for). Thanks for the heads up I'll open a support ticket.

vunderba 1 hour ago | parent

Decided to try out one of the new features in GPT Image 2.6: the ability to natively generate animated GIF files.

I didn't have high expectations, and I still think you can probably get better results by doing a First-Last-Frame using something like Minimax H3 but I was still rather surprised that it could do it at all.

Here are some of the results. The last one shows its ability to take an existing image and convert it into an animated GIF. It's a picture of my husky inside a snow globe.

https://imgpb.com/OzSMKJ

minimaxir 1 hour ago | parent

The splotchiness on that simple chess animation makes this GIF feature a nonstarter.

MattDamonSpace 1 hour ago | parent

Yeahhhh but that’s like saying Dall-E isn’t good enough

Ain’t wrong buuuuut…

vunderba 1 hour ago | parent

That's a bit hyperbolic. The windmill one is honestly not terrible (slight flicker on the door).

Honestly, you have to think about the use case. GIFs are going to be little throwaway things that you're pasting into Discord or meme-ing.

Nobody's reaching for a GIF if they're looking for professional results.

It's a shame that the SVG output seems to be limited to static vector graphics only though - or rather I couldn't get it to produce anything with the <animate> attribute.

brian-armstrong 1 hour ago | parent

Everyone is highly sensitive to slop, and it still looks like slop.

If you actually want something that looks decent, it feels like tool use would at least help cover the obvious blunders. Building layers to composite would go a long way to removing some slop here.

speak_plainly 1 hour ago | parent

On a phone, if you share a gif, it creates a link to ChatGPT.com with a static image. You can also save the image to photos and share directly from there which feels like an unnecessary step.

It feels like a sleazy pattern and defeats the purpose of why I’d want to generate a gif in the first place, which to make clear is likely going to be to share with friends in a chat. I’m not interested in driving traffic to ChatGPT.com to impress my friends.

augment_me 1 hour ago | parent

But then Meta/Apple/Google gets your behavioral surplus for selling Ads instead of OpenAI. Do you want higher subscription costs?

teamolHuang 1 hour ago | parent

wait... did we get (sort of) sora back???

minimaxir 1 hour ago | parent

Video generation models work much differently than what this GIF pipeline is doing here.

kamranjon 1 hour ago | parent

anyone else get the feeling this is a chinese model they are just hosting themselves?

ramesh31 1 hour ago | parent

Can we do animated sprites with alpha channel yet?

vunderba 10 minutes ago | parent

The only animation format it supports right now is GIF so you can only have a transparency channel that's either on or off. It doesn't support animated WebP.

See the second image of the bird flying.

https://imgpb.com/OzSMKJ

alexpadula 1 hour ago | parent

I really don't like this generative AI. I may look at it like an artist but completed generated software, writing, music and imagery is a robbery of human worth. Absolutely.

iamgopal 1 hour ago | parent

Generative AI is created by human worth.

alexpadula 1 hour ago | parent

No, it's created by data scanned from the internet, books and fed to the models. How is that a good thing for anyone? I'd love your take. People spend years giving themselves value to others to live a life of worth and value.

ion_trapper 1 hour ago | parent

The data just scanned itself and organized itself into an neural network? Would be an awesome display of bootstrapped intelligence if that happened! Sadly, it was the result of decades of human research.

alexpadula 1 hour ago | parent

Yep, that's the sad part.

jawns 1 hour ago | parent

My only use case for this is animating custom Slack emojis.

But trust, I'm a have a field day with that.

xgulfie 56 minutes ago | parent

"keep the shallow depth of field"

adds more depth of field

CuriousRose 40 minutes ago | parent

As an aside, there was a recent post about building in an emulator in an open model. I think it was Qwen 3.6. Actually, I think this type of hard-coded calculation would be very well suited to a small image model as seemingly trivial tasks like symmetry or moving text or placing a vector are quite difficult to do for models currently.

nayuki 26 minutes ago | parent

Off-topic, but the looping GIFs of stock prices going up / going down remind me of the currently airing anime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX_Fighter_Kurumi-chan .