In the world of AI image generation a new player has appeared. The startup Black Forest Labs, created by former developers of Stability AI, presented its development – a family of FLUX.1 models.
FLUX.1 ended a couple of months after the release of Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, which, to put it mildly, did not impress users. Many complained about strange images of people with distorted proportions, which caused a wave of ridicule on social networks.
Behind Black Forest Labs is a team known to people who follow the development of next-generation AI: Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann and Dominik Lorenz are key people who recently left Stability AI. They were also joined by Patrick Esser, one of the creators of the first Stable Diffusion.
The startup released three versions of FLUX.1 at the same time:
- FLUX.1 pro is a powerful business tool available via API.
- FLUX.1 dev is optional for non-commercial use.
- FLUX.1 schnell is a light version for fans of fast generation (schnell means “fast” in German).
The first tests show that FLUX.1 can seriously compete with existing market leaders. In some ways, the new algorithm is not inferior to DALL-E 3 in terms of accuracy of following the request and goes to Midjourney 6 in terms of photorealism. Additionally, FLUX.1 shows a clear superiority over Stable Diffusion XL, the team’s last major project before leaving Stability AI.
