OpenAI Imposes Speed Limits Due to Ghibli Image Craze

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced temporary speed restrictions for image generation in ChatGPT. The issue arose from the frenzy surrounding the mass creation of images in the anime style of Studio Ghibli.

it’s super fun seeing people love images in chatgpt.

but our GPUs are melting.

we are going to temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. hopefully won’t be long!

chatgpt free tier will get 3 generations per day soon.

— Sam Altman (@sama) March 27, 2025

“It’s super fun seeing people love images in ChatGPT. But our GPUs are melting. We are going to temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. Hopefully won’t be long,” the entrepreneur wrote.

Altman also mentioned plans to increase the number of available images per day to three for users without paid subscriptions. Previously, they could create up to two works using the AI model DALL-E 3.

In March, the startup added an image generator based on the GPT-4o model to ChatGPT and Sora. Initially, the tool was available to all. The company later removed the service for non-paying users indefinitely due to high demand.

Users noted the high quality of the service and began massively generating images in the style of Ghibli, the legendary Japanese studio founded in 1985. Altman contributed by publishing an anime-style portrait and changing his avatar on X.

Amidst this, several dozen meme coins emerged. The largest, Ghiblification (GHIBLI), peaked at a market capitalization of $42 million. At the time of writing, it stands at $27 million.

Binance Alpha added Ghiblification (Ghibli) and GhibliCZ (Ghibli) to its platform. The first token was created on the Solana network, the other on the BNB Chain.

In March, Sora’s head of development, Rohan Sahay, expressed the company’s desire to integrate a video generator into ChatGPT.