Adobe Firefly and ChatGPT images in WhatsApp mark apps as generative AI hubs

As it becomes clear that a lot of the generative artificial intelligence (AI) usage is shifting to smartphones, AI companies scramble to make their apps more capable, and unlock new ways for users to access. OpenAI's approach sees ChatGPT integration within its WhatsApp bot, for quick image generation without needing to access OpenAI's models on the web or its own smartphone app. Meta's WhatsApp is incredibly popular worldwide, with 1.5 billion daily active users, which gives OpenAI a strong foothold to propel.
Earlier, Perplexity too made its AI available as a chatbot on WhatsApp, which also includes an ability to generate images with text prompts.
A Firefly app, finally
At Adobe Max last year, HT had detailed how the company gave its creative apps a broader feature suite, with AI as the foundation. All of this, defined by their Firefly model. Yet, as time passed, there remained a nagging feeling that Adobe was missing a trick with its Firefly AI suite by not having an app for smartphones. More than anything else, to simply make it easy to access, on a user's phone or tablet.
In this time, coincidentally, AI companies generally made considerable moves to fine-tune AI-enabled content creation. Another illustration of this rapid transition is that just before this year's I/O keynote, Google rolled out updates for the Gemini app across Android and iPhone, unlocking Veo 2 for video generation and new Imagen model for images.
That has now changed. Adobe's Firefly app is now available for iPhones and Android devices. The integrated tools include text prompts to generate a video clip up to 7 seconds in duration and in up to 1080p resolution, text to image as well as generative fill and generative expand that had already found space in Adobe's popular creative tools including Photoshop.
'Our goal with Firefly is to deliver creators the most comprehensive destination on web and mobile to access the best generative models from across the industry, in a single integrated experience from ideation to generation and editing,' says Ely Greenfield, Adobe's senior vice president and chief technology officer. If you are thinking Adobe's simply pushing a case for its own Firefly models (of course it is) and not much else, you'd be very, very wrong.
There are Adobe's own Firefly Image 4 Ultra, Firefly Image 4 and Firefly Image 3. And then there are the third-party models, including Google's Imagen 4, Imagen 3 and Veo 2, as well as OpenAI's GPT Image.
Adobe says the Firefly generative AI ecosystem will be integrating models from Ideogram, Luma AI, Pika and Runway, alongside existing models from OpenAI, Google and Black Forest Labs too — that makes it the first creative platform of its kind, to integrate a large number of third party models too, as users get broader choice of generative styles, aesthetics and specifics such as formats and resolutions.
Subscriptions are priced at ₹499 per month or ₹4,999 per year for 750 monthly credits, and 100GB storage. Generations get synced basis the Creative Cloud account, linking them to other Adobe apps including Lightroom and Photoshop, as well as the consumer focused Express.
OpenAI unlocks more, on WhatsApp
Remember those Ghibli-style images that caught social media feeds by storm, earlier this year? OpenAI's WhatsApp bet sees the image generation capabilities being made available as part of their WhatsApp toolset (1-800-ChatGPT is the number to save in WhatsApp). This is underlined by the company's newest generation GPT-4o model, which natively supports image generation.
There are two broad ways to use image generation within WhatsApp using the GPT-4o model — ask AI to create any image with a detailed text prompt, or upload a photo and describe how a user would want to transform it.
'GPT4o's image generation follows detailed prompts with attention to detail. While other systems struggle with ~5-8 objects, GPT4o can handle up to 10-20 different objects,' the company had said in a statement, when the model was released earlier this year.
OpenAI says ChatGPT on WhatsApp works with all subscription tiers — that is Free, Plus and Pro — but each with differing amounts of usability that will be notified as a user closes in on those rate limits.

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