GPT Image 2.6 tops image-editing leaderboard
OpenAI's GPT Image 2.6 Sunburst now leads Artificial Analysis's human-preference ranking for instruction-based image editing, though its lead over the next three models falls within overlapping confidence intervals.
OpenAI's newest image models have moved to the top of the AA-Image-Editing v2.1 leaderboard. Artificial Analysis ranks models by Elo, using pairwise human preference votes on edits made from text instructions. GPT Image 2.6 Sunburst (max) is first at 1210, and GPT Image 2.6 Flare (max) is second at 1206. Both were released this month. As we reported earlier, the 2.6 release is the one that added GIF animation.
The margin at the top is narrow. The two 2.6 models, GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst (1201) and Microsoft's MAI-Image-2.7-Preview (1198) have overlapping 95% intervals. Artificial Analysis lists their possible ranks as somewhere between 1 and 5. The 2.6 models also have far fewer votes behind them, about 6,500 each, compared with roughly 19,000 for the 2.5 versions. MAI-Image-2.7-Preview does not yet have an API.
Below the top four:
- 5th: GPT Image 2.5 Flare, 1184
- 6th: Kling Image 4.0 (preview), 1182, released in November with pricing listed as "coming soon"
- 7th: ByteDance's Seedream 5.5, 1159
Price varies widely. The top OpenAI entries cost $210.72 per 1,000 images, compared with $28.00 for Seedream 5.5 and $33.60 for Google's Nano Banana 2.1, which scores 1152.
Artificial Analysis says 13 models were added in the past 30 days. They include H3-Image and H3-Image Highspeed; the Highspeed variant scores 1134 at $45.25 per 1,000 images. Several new entries appear without names on the leaderboard.