Bing AI's new image creation feature looks superb - but is proving too popular for its own good

Microsoft made the decision to roll out the revamped Dall-E 3.0 image creation capability to Bing AI users at the weekend - but demand means the feature is working slower than expected.

As Microsoft's head of Advertising and Web Services, Mikhail Parakhin, explained on Twitter, the company kicked off the broad rollout of Dall-E 3.0 to Bing chatbot users at the start of the weekend (on September 29, with it expected to reach everyone by the end of the day).

However, what Microsoft didn't count on was how many folks out there would want to head over to Bing AI and try out the new image generation.

Parakhin tells us on X (formerly Twitter) that "some strong interest" was expected but not to the level that was seen. As a result, there are indeed some tweets complaining about sluggishness with Dall-E 3.0.

The solution? To bring in more GPUs for Bing AI to tap when dealing with the many queries asking it to create an image.

And when Parakhin says more graphics cards, we are talking about thousands of H100-equivalent GPUs, no less.

This is another indication of the kind of demand that the Bing chatbot can command, at least for this facet of the AI. Of course, with the image creation functionality being freshly revamped, it's not unexpected to see a rush in demand as noted.

That should calm down a bit, of course, though we have to say, given some of the results we've seen posted on X from Dall-E 3.0 - which look pretty impressive indeed - usage could certainly ramp up to another level going forward.

This looks like a win for Microsoft so far, and something that Google might be concerned about given the great chatbot arms race between the Bing and Bard AIs.