Sam Altman says the "biblical demand" for ChatGPT-4o's Ghibli memes has added one million users in just one hour, but "chill out a bit — our GPUs are melting"

It doesn't come as a surprise that OpenAI's latest upgrade for ChatGPT is a hit among most users, especially because of its the unhinged and unrestricted nature of its image generation capabilities powered by GPT-4o. As such, the AI chatbot's user base has grown significantly over the past few days.

Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that ChatGPT had achieved a mega milestone, adding over one million users in a little under an hour.

For context, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, Sam Altman referred to it as "one of the craziest viral moments" he'd ever seen, which attracted over one million users in five days. In comparison, ChatGPT-4o's new image generation capabilities seem to be a major hit that the chatbot's actual launch, making an hour as revolutionary as five days.

However, the rising interest in ChatGPT's image-generation capabilities comes with its fair share of challenges. Sam Altman admitted that the tool is way popular than the company had initially expected, prompting OpenAI to delay the release of the tool to free users for a while.

The executive revealed that the delay was prompted by a shortage of GPUs to support the tool's computing power needs. "Our GPUs are melting," added Altman.

The popularity of the image generation tool led to issues with new signups, but it has seemingly been fixed. "Can y'all please chill on generating images this is insane our team needs sleep."

OpenAI's CEO indicated that the image generation tool's popularity has a dedicated team in place to ensure the service remains available. "We just haven’t been able to catch up since launch so people are still working to keep the service up," added Altman. "Biblical demand, I have never seen anything like it."

While ChatGPT's image generation capabilities stack miles ahead other conventional tools like its predecessor DALL-E 3 and more in creating original images, it's raising concern among artists and creatives.

As expected, the tool is riddled with copyright infringement issues, as it leverages copyrighted information from the internet for training and recreates iterations of the original work without compensation or attribution.