>Given the expense of training gpt-image-1, I was worried that nobody else would be able to afford to train the competition

OpenAI models are expensive to train because it’s beneficial for OpenAI models to be expensive and there is no incentive to optimize when they’re gonna run in a server farm anyway.

Probably a bunch of teams never bothered trying to replicate Dall-E 1+2 because the training run cost millions, yet SD1.5 showed us comparable tech can run on a home computer and be trained from scratch for thousands or fine tuned for cents.