OpenAI’s latest AI model launch has raised questions about the company’s wide range of projects and priorities, due in part to an NSFW image that co-founder and CEO Sam Altman generated and shared to promote it.
On December 16, OpenAI released an updated image-generation feature for ChatGPT, powered by its latest text-to-image AI model, named GPT-Image-1.5. Altman posted about the new model on his X account, and, as an example of its capabilities, included an AI-generated image of himself as a shirtless, muscular firefighter standing above a Christmas-themed December calendar.
According to X’s metrics, Altman’s firefighter post has been viewed over four million times and reposted over 1,000 times. Several of those reposts pointed out that the December dates in the calendar aren’t accurate to 2025, while others remarked on the disparity between Altman’s bold claims of using AI to cure cancer and eliminate poverty and OpenAI’s current offerings.
GPT-Image-1.5 is designed to compete against Nano Banana, the popular AI image generator and editor Google released in August. According to a recent report from The Information, OpenAI deprioritized development on new image models several months ago, but when Google released Nano Banana, “leaders at OpenAI rushed to improve its image technology.”
The Information also reported that according to some OpenAI employees, for much of 2025 “Altman seemed to be running OpenAI as if it had already conquered the chatbot market,” venturing beyond the core ChatGPT business into AI video and social media with Sora, web browsers with ChatGPT Atlas, and a physical device currently being designed by Jony Ive. Some of these initiatives reportedly “took resources away from efforts to increase ChatGPT’s mass appeal.”
In a video posted to OpenAI’s X account on December 17, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman admitted that new products like image generation require large amounts of compute, which has forced leadership to make difficult trade-offs.
When OpenAI released its previous frontier image-generation model in March of this year, it set off a viral trend of users generating images in the style of beloved anime production company Studio Ghibli. Usually, having your product go viral is an absolute win for businesses, but according to Brockman, the trend was so massive that OpenAI decided to “take a bunch of compute from research and move it to our deployment” in order to meet the demand. “That was really sacrificing the future for the present,” Brockman said in the video.
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Ben Sherry
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