OpenAI's livestream of GPT-4o Image Generation shows that it is slowwwwwwwwww (maybe 30 seconds per image, which Sam Altman had to spin "it's slow but the generated images are worth it"). Instead of using a diffusion approach, it appears to be generating the image tokens and decoding them akin to the original DALL-E (https://openai.com/index/dall-e/), which allows for streaming partial generations from top to bottom. In contrast, Google's Gemini can generate images and make edits in seconds.
No API yet, and given the slowness I imagine it will cost much more than the $0.03+/image of competitors.
No API yet, and given the slowness I imagine it will cost much more than the $0.03+/image of competitors.