OpenAI shipped GPT Image 2.5 on September 8 with two API variants — Flare (speed, default) and Sunburst (precision) — at the same price as 2.0 ($5 text / $8 image in, $30 image out per 1M tokens), with up to 50% lower latency. The marketing-relevant upgrade isn't raw image quality; it's that the model finally respects what you asked it to leave alone. Five jobs worth rerouting, three to keep on Nano Banana 2, Midjourney V8, or Seedream 5.0 Pro, and the one sentence that captures the split.
