Where's the raccoon with the ham radio? (ChatGPT Images 2.0)

Simon Willison’s Weblog Subscribe Sponsored by: Honeycomb — AI agents behave unpredictably. Get the context you need to debug what actually happened. Read the blog Where’s the raccoon with the ham radio? (ChatGPT Images 2.0) OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.0 today, their latest image generation model. On the livestream Sam Altman said that the leap from gpt-image-1 to gpt-image-2 was equivalent to jumping from GPT-3 to GPT-5. Here’s how I put it to the test. My prompt: Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio gpt-image-1 # First as a baseline here’s what I got from the older gpt-image-1 using ChatGPT directly: I wasn’t able to spot the raccoon—I quickly realized that testing image generation models on Where’s Waldo style images (Where’s Wally in the UK) can be pretty frustrating! I tried getting Claude Opus 4.7 with its new higher resolution inputs to solve it but it was convinced there was a raccoon it couldn’t find thanks to the instruction card at the top left of the image: Yes — there’s at least one raccoon in the picture, but it’s very well hidden. In my careful sweep through zoomed-in sections, honestly, I couldn’t definitively spot a raccoon holding a ham radio. [...] Nano Banana 2 and Pro # Next I tried Google’s Nano Banana 2, via Gemini: That one was pretty obvious, the raccoon is in the “Amateur Radio Club” booth in the center of the image! Claude said: Honestly, this one wasn’t really hiding — he’s the star of the booth. Feels like the illustrator took pity on us after that last impossible scene. The little “W6HAM” callsign pun on the booth sign is a nice touch too. I also tried Nano Banana Pro in AI Studio and got this, by far the worst result from any model. Not sure what went wrong here! gpt-image-2 # With the baseline established, let’s try out the new model. I used an updated version of my openai_image.py script, which is a thin wrapper around the OpenAI Python client library. Their client library hasn’t yet been updated to include gpt-image-2 but thankfully it doesn’t validate the model ID so you can use it anyway. Here’s how I ran that: OPENAI_API_KEY="$(llm keys get openai)" \ uv run https://tools.simonwillison.net/python/openai_image.py \ -m gpt-image-2 \ "Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio" Here’s what I got back. I don’t think there’s a raccoon in there—I couldn’t spot one, and neither could Claude. The OpenAI image generation cookbook has been updated with notes on gpt-image-2, including the outputQuality setting and available sizes. I tried setting outputQuality to high and the dimensions to 3840x2160—I believe that’s the maximum—and got this—a 17MB PNG which I converted to a 5MB WEBP: OPENAI_API_KEY="$(llm keys get openai)" \ uv run 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/tools/refs/heads/main/python/openai_image.py' \ -m gpt-image-2 "Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio" \ --quality high --size 3840x2160 That’s pretty great! There’s a raccoon with a ham radio in there (bottom left, quite easy to spot). The image used 13,342 output tokens, which are charged at $30/million so a total cost of around 40 cents. Takeaways # I think this new ChatGPT image generation model takes the crown from Gemini, at least for the moment. Where’s Waldo style images are an infuriating and somewhat foolish way to test these models, but they do help illustrate how good they are getting at complex illustrations combining both text and details. Update: asking models to solve this is risky # rizaco on Hacker News asked ChatGPT to draw a red circle around the raccoon in one of the images in which I had failed to find one. Here’s an animated mix of their result and the original image: Looks like we definitely can’t trust these models to usefully solve their own puzzles! Posted 21st April 2026 at 8:32 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter More recent articles Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 - 18th April 2026 Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach - we have new AI and security tracks this year - 17th April 2026 This is Where’s the raccoon with the ham radio? (ChatGPT Images 2.0) by Simon Willison, posted on 21st April 2026. ai 1973 openai 407 generative-ai 1749 chatgpt 194 llms 1716 text-to-image 41 llm-release 193 nano-banana 8 Previous: Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 Monthly briefing Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments. Pay me to send you less! Sponsor & subscribe Disclosures Colophon © 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026