‘Our GPUs are melting’: ChatGPT's Sam Altman imposes rate limits amid Ghibli image trend

OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o now features an advanced image generator which can produce images inspired by Studio Ghibli's animation style.

Published on: Mar 29, 2025, 12:47:39 IST

By HT News Desk

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While almost everyone on the internet has hopped on the trend of generating Studio-Ghibli inspired images within a matter of just a few prompts, the trend has taken a toll on OpenAI’s graphic processing units (GPUs).

The studio Ghibli-style animation was primarily founded and perfected by legendary Japanese filmmaker and animator Hayao Miyazaki.

Soon after the frenzy over the anime-style image generation took over, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman on Thursday took to his social media and said that their GPUs are “melting” because of it.

Also read: Ghibli-style AI images: How to create portraits with Grok 3, subscribe to ChatGPT? Know more about 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 said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

What is the trend?

Sam Altman’s OpenAI rolled its most advanced image generator recently, through a latest update on the ChatGPT-4o model. This lets users generate images in the style of Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation studio which produced movies such as ‘Spirited Away’ and ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’.

The animation style was primarily founded and perfected by legendary Japanese filmmaker and animator Hayao Miyazaki, who has also won Oscars for two of his movies - ‘Spirited Away’ and ‘The Boy and the Heron’.

The artform majorly consists of hand drawn frames of serene aesthetics and dreamy landscapes with soft colour palette. The Studio Ghibli movies are known for their dreamlike quality and unusual yet deep storytelling.

Ever since the feature has been rolled out, the users are either uploading their existing images to be turned into Ghibli-inspired images or are generating fresh images with the use of simple prompts. The internet is flooded with such AI-developed art, dividing the users into those who find the trend amusing and those who believe it disrespects the artform which took years to be perfected.

What are GPUs?

According to Google, a GPU, short for Graphics Processing Unit, is a specialised electronic circuit originally designed to speed up the creation of images and videos.

Also known as the workhorse of modern artificial intelligence, GPUs’ speciality lies in performing a large number of operations at the same time. They achieve this by having a large number of processing cores that can work on different parts of a task simultaneously, according to Google.

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HT News Desk
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