I think in terms of image generation, ChatGPT is the biggest leap since Stable Diffusion's release. LoRA/ControlNet/Flux are forgettable in comparison.
what is that?
Of course, nobody really knows what 4o image generation really is under the hood, but it looks to be like some kind of hybrid system like Transfusion to me. It is much better at prompt adherence than diffusion models, but its output can be clunkier/stylistically incoherent. At times, it also exhibits similar failure modes as diffusion (such as weirdly rotated body parts).
Given how it behaves, I think Gemini 2.0 Flash image generation is probably the same approach but with a smaller parameter count. It's... eerie... how close together these two were released and how similar they appear to be.
The AI field looks awfully like {OpenAI, Google, The Irrelevent}.
Now for the bad part: I don't think Black Forest Labs, StabilityAI, MidJourney, or any of the others can compete with this. They probably don't have the money to train something this large and sophisticated. We might be stuck with OpenAI and Google (soon) for providing advanced multimodal image models.
Maybe we'll get lucky and one of the large Chinese tech companies will drop a model with this power. But I doubt it.
This might be the first OpenAI product with an extreme moat.
Yeah. I'm a tad sad about it. I once thought the SD ecosystem proves open-source won when it comes to image gen (a naive idea, I know). It turns out big corps won hard in this regard.