Inside image generation’s Renaissance moment — the OpenAI Podcast Ep. 19

People are generating over 1.5 billion images a week in ChatGPT. In this episode, Product lead Adele Li and researcher Kenji Hata share some of the new use cases and trends since the launch of Images 2.0. Together with host Andrew Mayne, they trace the progress from the early DALL-E days and dive into the latest capabilities, including better text rendering, photorealism, multilingual support, world knowledge, aspect ratios, and character consistency. They also explore what comes next as image generation models evolve into more capable creative assistants. Chapters 00:36 How Adele and Kenji came to work on Images 02:27 Images 2.0 launch reception 05:25 Productivity use cases and and 360 images 09:34: Viral trends, authenticity, and imperfection 10:51 Training breakthroughs and photorealism 14:06 Evals, prompting, and creative control 22:16 Creative agents and what comes next 22:27 Images + Codex 28:08 Prompt tips

Andrew MaynehostAdele LiguestKenji Hataguest

May 14, 202629mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: May 14, 2026
Duration: 29m
Channel: OpenAI
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

People are generating over 1.5 billion images a week in ChatGPT. In this episode, Product lead Adele Li and researcher Kenji Hata share some of the new use cases and trends since the launch of Images 2.0. Together with host Andrew Mayne, they trace the progress from the early DALL-E days and dive into the latest capabilities, including better text rendering, photorealism, multilingual support, world knowledge, aspect ratios, and character consistency. They also explore what comes next as image generation models evolve into more capable creative assistants. Chapters 00:36 How Adele and Kenji came to work on Images 02:27 Images 2.0 launch reception 05:25 Productivity use cases and and 360 images 09:34: Viral trends, authenticity, and imperfection 10:51 Training breakthroughs and photorealism 14:06 Evals, prompting, and creative control 22:16 Creative agents and what comes next 22:27 Images + Codex 28:08 Prompt tips

SPEAKERS

Andrew Mayne
host
Host of the OpenAI Podcast.
Adele Li
guest
Product lead at OpenAI for Image Generation (Images 2.0) in ChatGPT.
Kenji Hata
guest
OpenAI researcher working on GPT Images/Image Generation, model evaluation, and efficiency.

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of OpenAI, featuring Andrew Mayne and Adele Li, Inside image generation’s Renaissance moment — the OpenAI Podcast Ep. 19 explores image Gen 2.0’s leap: photorealism, text, productivity, and creative agents Image Gen 2.0 is positioned as a major capability jump driven by better text rendering, multilingual performance, and much stronger photorealism.

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