In late September, Microsoft announced a ton of software updates related to its AI efforts. One of them was that Bing Image Creator, its generative AI-based art maker, had been officially upgraded with the DALL-E 3 model from OpenAI as of late Friday, September 29, and was available for all of its users.
However, it looks like the addition of DALL-E 3 in Bing Image Creator has caused a big boost in the number of people accessing it, and as a result, the service can sometimes be slow in making images.
This has been noted by a number of people on X (formerly Twitter), including @DmitryForLeader who wrote that he had to wait over two hours to get an image. Others have posted reports of similar long waits to see their artwork generated.
It looks like Microsoft is very aware of this issue and is working to fix it ASAP. Mikhail Parakhin, the new head of Microsoft's Windows and Web Services team, posted his own X message which stated that they didn't expect as much interest in DALL-E 3 in Bing Image Creator from its users this past weekend.
Folks, we know DALL-E 3.0 generation right now is taking longer than normal. We expected some strong interest, but we didn't expect THAT much, especially given it's a weekend. Bringing more GPUs in, will be better soon.
— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) October 1, 2023
Parakhin stated that Microsoft is "bringing more GPUs in" and that should help to decrease the wait time "soon". When asked in a follow-up message just how many GPUs are being added, Parakhin responded with, "Measured in thousands of H100-equivalent."
That's a reference to NVIDIA's H100 GPUs, which have been made and bought by the boatload by Microsoft and other companies for use in their data centers specifically for generative AI services like Bing Chat and Bing Image Creator. Those sales have also caused NVIDIA's stock price to skyrocket in 2023.
