OpenAI's New Image Models Add GIFs and Six-Second Renders

OpenAI has split its image generator into two, trading the usual one-size-fits-all model for a fast lane and a careful one. The company announced GPT Image 2.6 with a pair of API models, Flare and Sunburst, and rolled the update into ChatGPT and its Codex tools across web, desktop, and mobile.

Flare is the quick one. OpenAI says it can return an image in as little as six seconds when quality is dialed down, which is aimed at the kind of work where you iterate fast and throw most results away. Sunburst is the opposite instinct: slower, higher quality, and better at keeping a subject consistent across a series of edits. The company puts the overall speed gain at about 50 percent over the previous generation.

The features matter more than the speed

The headline for anyone who actually makes things is not raw speed, it is what the models can now output. GPT Image 2.6 adds animated GIFs, turning a prompt or a still into a short loop. It can export SVG, the vector format designers need when an image has to scale cleanly to any size, which is a real gap in most image generators. There is also markup-guided editing, where you mark up the picture to point the model at what you want changed, and a complexity setting to trade detail against cost.

Pricing, per OpenAI, holds at the previous generation's rate, so the new capabilities arrive without a premium. Some of the finer details, like GIF frame counts and size limits, are not spelled out in the announcement, so anyone building against the API will want to check the docs rather than the marketing.

The competitive backdrop

The timing is not an accident. Google only just made its own video model cheaper and more widely available, and the generative-media field has turned into a steady trade of speed, price, and output formats. SVG export and markup edits are the sort of practical, workflow-shaped features that suggest OpenAI is now chasing the people who use these tools for a living, not just the ones trying them out.