OpenAI Opens the Image Floodgates

Pivot 5
April 29, 2025

1. OpenAI Unlocks GPT-Image-1 for Developers via Low-Cost API

OpenAI has made its GPT-Image-1 multimodal image generator—previously exclusive to ChatGPT—available through its API. The model produced 700 million images for 130 million users in its first week on ChatGPT, proving huge latent demand.
Token rates are $5 per million for text, $10 per million for image inputs and $40 per million for image outputs, putting finished images at just $0.02–$0.19 apiece. Adobe, Figma, Airtable and Wix are already live on the API, with Instacart and Quora testing niche use cases.
Cheap, high-fidelity image generation will become table stakes for every customer-facing workflow.

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During its latest earnings call, Google management disclosed that AI tools now generate more than one-third of all code across the company.
The statistic covers Google’s entire engineering output and signals that AI coding assistants have moved from experiment to core infrastructure. It marks a steep jump from last year's disclosures, demonstrating rapid adoption.
AI-augmented engineering has reached industrial scale. Any firm still debating pilot projects has already fallen behind the productivity curve.

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Digital-media giant Ziff Davis, owner of CNET, PCMag and IGN, has filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. The suit alleges OpenAI “intentionally and relentlessly” copied millions of articles, stripped copyright notices and ignored robots.txt directives.
Ziff Davis publishes nearly 2 million articles annually and attracts 292 million monthly visitors—making it the largest publisher yet to sue the AI firm. The company seeks an injunction forcing OpenAI to destroy any datasets or models containing its content, even as rivals like Vox Media and the AP ink licensing deals.
The legal fight is shifting from payment negotiations to existential injunctions. Enterprises must audit AI suppliers for rights-cleared data.

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PRESENTED BY GOOGLE CLOUD

Google Cloud’s 601 Generative AI Use Cases is a curated guide for real-world enterprise adoption. It showcases how top companies are actually deploying gen AI across industries.
From UPS building a digital twin to Woven by Toyota slashing development costs, the examples are sharp. Canva, Replit, and McDonald’s show how gen AI is already remaking content, code, and customer experience.
Gen AI is no longer experimental—it’s operational. CEOs still in exploration mode may already be behind.

Apple is transferring its covert robotics unit from John Giannandrea’s AI group to hardware chief John Ternus’s division. The shift signals executive impatience with Apple’s slow pace in consumer-facing AI.
The change follows recent moves to remove Siri development from Giannandrea, marking his second major loss in as many months. Leadership wants his team focused on core AI research while hardware engineering takes charge of robotics execution.
Apple’s board is consolidating mission-critical bets under proven shippers.

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Future Works’ Matt Leta argues that hourly wages are obsolete because AI lets teams finish a day’s work in two hours, widening productivity gaps within six weeks. He calls traditional time-based pay “perverse” in an AI-first economy.
Deloitte’s value-based model delivered a 312% surge in high-value outputs, while GitLab, Automattic, Microsoft and Google now award innovation bonuses of 20%–200% of base salary. Leta warns that companies failing to realign incentives will haemorrhage top talent to competitors that do.
The real AI dividend lies in liberated payroll economics.

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