8 ms·
FLUX.2: Frontier Visual Intelligence
- eric-p7 11mo agoYes yes very impressive. But can it still turn my screen orange?
- xnx 11mo agoGood to see there's some competition to Nano Banana Pro. Other players are important for keeping the price of the leaders in check.
- minimaxir 11mo agoText encoder is Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct-2506 (which is multimodal) as opposed to the weird choice to use CLIP and T5 in the original FLUX, so that's a good start albeit kinda big for a model intended to be open weight. BFL likely should have held off the release until their Apache 2.0 distilled model was released in order to better differentiate from Nano Banana/Nano Banana Pro. The pricing structure on the Pro variant is...weird: > Input: We charge $0.015 for each megapixel on the input (i.e. reference images for editing) > Output: The first megapixel is charged $0.03 and then each subsequent MP will be charged $0.015
- beernet 11mo agoNice catch. Looks like engineers tried to take care of the GTM part as well and (surprise!) messed it up. In any case, the biggest loser here is Europe once again.
- throwaway314155 11mo ago> as opposed to the weird choice to use CLIP and T5 in the original FLUX This method was used in tons of image generation models. Not saying it's superior or even a good idea, but it definitely wasn't "weird".
- dragonwriter 11mo agoConsidering how little (and sometimes negative) benefit it provided in most of them compared to just using the biggest encoder model and having a null prompt on the rest (not just those using the specific combination Flux.1 did, but for most of the multi-encoder models), its actually pretty weird that people kept doing it.
- woadwarrior01 11mo ago> BFL likely should have held off the release until their Apache 2.0 distilled model was released in order to better differentiate from Nano Banana/Nano Banana Pro. Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 is going to be released next week. And it will be Apache 2.0 licensed. I suspect that was one of the factors in the decision to release FLUX.2 this week.
- minimaxir 11mo agoFair point.
- kouteiheika 11mo ago> as opposed to the weird choice to use CLIP and T5 in the original FLUX Yeah, CLIP here was essentially useless. You can even completely zero the weights through which the CLIP input is ingested by the model and it barely changes anything.
- 542458 11mo ago> Run FLUX.2 [dev] on GeForce RTX GPUs for local experimentation with an optimized fp8 reference implementation of FLUX.2 [dev], created in collaboration with NVIDIA and ComfyUI. Glad to see that they're sticking with open weights. That said, Flux 1.x was 12B params, right? So this is about 3x as large plus a 24B text encoder (unless I'm misunderstanding), so it might be a significant challenge for local use. I'll be looking forward to the distill version.
- minimaxir 11mo agoLooking at the file sizes on the open weights version (https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-dev/tree/main https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-dev/tree/mai...), the 24B text encoder is 48GB, the generation model itself is 64GB, which roughly tracks with it being the 32B parameters mentioned. Downloading over 100GB of model weights is a tough sell for the local-only hobbyists.
- BadBadJellyBean 11mo agoNever mind the download size. Who has the VRAM to run it?
- pixelpoet 11mo agoI do, 2x Strix Halo machines ready to go.
- zamadatix 11mo ago(Fellow Strix Halo owner): I don't really like calling it VRAM any more than when a dGPU dynamically maps a portion of system RAM. It's really just a system with quad channel RAM speeds attached to a GPU without VRAM - nearly 2x identical in performance to using the system RAM on my 2 channel desktop instead of actual VRAM on the dGPU in the system (which is something like 20x). That's great, and I love the little laptop for the amount of x86 perf it can pack into so little cooling, but my used Epyc box of ~the same price is usually faster for AI (despite the complete lack of video card) and able to load models 3x the size (well, before RAM prices doubled this last month) because it has modular 12 channel RAM and memory speeds this low don't really need a GPU to keep up with the matrix math. Meanwhile, Flux is already slow when it's on actual real high bandwidth dedicated GPU memory VRAM.
- beernet 11mo agoOh, looks like someone had to release something very quickly after Google came for their lunch. Their little 15 mins is over already for BFL as it seems.
- whywhywhywhy 11mo agocomparing a closed image model to an open one is like comparing a compiled closed source app to raw source code. it's pointless to compare in pure output when one is set in stone and the other can be built upon.
- beernet 11mo agoDid you guys even check the licence? Not sure what is "open source" about that. Open weights at the very best, yet highly restrictive
- gunalx 11mo agoYep, definetly this, They should have creds for open weigths, and bein transparent of it not being open source though. Pepole should stop being this confused when the messaging is pretty clear.
- timmmmmmay 11mo agoyeah except I can download this and run it on my computer, whereas Nano Banana is a service that Google will suddenly discontinue the instant they get bored with it
- echelon 11mo ago> Launch Partners Wow, the Krea relationship soured? These are both a16z companies and they've worked on private model development before. Krea.1 was supposed to be something to compete with Midjourney aesthetics and get away from the plastic-y Flux models with artificial skin tones, weird chins, etc. This list of partners includes all of Krea's competitors: HiggsField (current aggregator leader), Freepik, "Open"Art, ElevenLabs (which now has an aggregator product), Leonardo.ai, Lightricks, etc. but Krea is absent. Really strange omission. I wonder what happened.
- dvrp 11mo agoThey messed up. We (Krea) were also surprised. They put our logo after we pointed it out. Nice eye!
- throwaway314155 11mo agoWhat?
- Shelby-Thomas 11mo ago[dead]
- AmazingTurtle 11mo agoI ran "family guy themed cyberpunk 2077 ingame screenshot, peter griffin as main character, third person view, view of character from the back" on both nano banana pro and bfl flux 2 pro. The results were staggering. The google model aligned better with the cyberpunk ingame scene, flux was too "realistic"
- Yokohiii 11mo agoi think they focus their dataset on photography. flux 1 dev one was never really great at artistic style, mostly locking you into a somewhat generic style. my little flux 2 pro testing does seem to verify that. but with lora ecosystem and enough time to fiddle flux 1 dev is probably still the best if you want creative stylistic results.
- spyder 11mo agoGreat, especially that they still have an open-weight variant of this new model too. But what happened to their work on their unreleased SOTA video model? did it stop being SOTA, others got ahead, and they folded the project, or what? YT video about it: https://youtu.be/svIHNnM1Pa0?t=208 https://youtu.be/svIHNnM1Pa0?t=208 They even removed the page of that: https://bfl.ai/up-next/ https://bfl.ai/up-next/
- liuliu 11mo agoAs a startup, they pivoted and focused on image models (they are model providers, and image models often have more use cases than video models, not to mention they continue to have bigger image dataset moat, not video).
- echelon 11mo ago> bigger image dataset moat If they have so much data, then why do Flux model outputs look so God-awful bad? They have plastic skin, weird chins, and have that "AI" aura. Not the good AI aura, mind you. The cheap automated YouTube video kind that you immediately skip. Flux 2 seems to suffer from the exact same problems. Midjourney is ancient. Their CEO is off trying to build a 3D volume and dating companion or some nonsense and leaving the product without guidance and much change. It almost feels abandoned. But even so, Midjourney has 10,000x better aesthetics despite having terrible prompt adherence and control. Midjourney images are dripping with magazine spread or Pulitzer aesthetics. It's why Zuckerberg went to them to license their model instead of quasi "open source" BFL. Even SDXL looks better, and that's a literal dinosaur. Most of the amazing things you see on social media either come from Midjourney or SDXL. To this day.
- SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago>Even SDXL looks better, and that's a literal dinosaur. I’m not saying you are wrong in effect, but for reference just slightly over 2 years ago was SDZL released, and it took about a year to have great fine tunes.
- 11mo ago
- Yokohiii 11mo ago18gb 4 bit quant via diffusers. "low vram setup" :)
- notrealyme123 11mo ago> The FLUX.2 - VAE is available on HF under an Apache 2.0 license. anyone found this? To me the link doesn't lead to the model
- minimaxir 11mo agoThere is no repo for the VAE on Hugging Face yet which implies it's not up yet: https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/models?sort=created https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/models?sort=created
- abidlinker 11mo agoIt's here: https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-dev/tree/main/vae https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-dev/tree/mai...
- minimaxir 11mo agoThat's a subfolder of the non-Apache 2.0 repo so it can't be used as if it was, for now.
- DeathArrow 11mo agoIf this is still a diffusion model, I wonder how well does it compare with NanoBanana.
- liuliu 11mo agoThere is no reason to believe Gemini Image is not diffusion model. In fact, generated result suggests it at least have VAE and very likely is a diffusion model variant. (Most likely a transfusion model).
- geooff_ 11mo agoTheir published benchmarks leave a lot to be desired. I would be interested in seeing their multi-image performance vs. Nano Banana. I just finished up benchmarking Image Editing models and while Nano Banana is the clear winner for one-shot editing its not great at few-shot.
- minimaxir 11mo agoThe issue with testing multi-image with Flux is that it's expensive due to its pricing scheme ($0.015 per input image for Flux 2 Pro, $0.06 per input image for Flux 2 Flex: https://bfl.ai/pricing?category=flux.2 https://bfl.ai/pricing?category=flux.2) while the cost of adding additional images is neligible in Nano Banana ($0.000387 per image). In the case of Flux 2 Pro, adding just one image increases the total cost to be greater than a Nano Banana generation.
- DeathArrow 11mo agoWe probably won't be able to run it on regular PCs, even with a 5090. So I am curious how good the results will be using a quntized version.
- shikon7 11mo agoYou can run it with a 5090 and the standard ComfyUI template, it just offloads some parts to RAM. Image generation takes about a minute for sizes like 1024x1024.
- visioninmyblood 11mo agoThe model looks good for an open source model. I want to see how these models are trained. may be they have a base model from academic datasets and quickly fine-tune with models like nano banana pro or something? That could be the game for such models. But great to see an open source model competing with the big players.
- anjneymidha 11mo agothey released a research post on how the new model's VAE was trained here: https://bfl.ai/research/representation-comparison https://bfl.ai/research/representation-comparison
- visioninmyblood 11mo agogreat this is more on the techincal details. it is great but would be great to see the data. I know they will not expose such information but would be great to have a visibility onto the datasets and how the data was sourced.
- E-Reverance 11mo agoSurprised there wasn't any mention of Equilibrium Matching [1] in the future work section [1] https://raywang4.github.io/equilibrium_matching/ https://raywang4.github.io/equilibrium_matching/
- jakozaur 11mo agoFLUX.1 Pro Kontext was one of the best artistic model, still great at instruction following comparing to MidJourney V7. See my third comparison in Nano Banana blog post: https://quesma.com/blog/nano-banana-pro-intelligence-with-tools/ https://quesma.com/blog/nano-banana-pro-intelligence-with-to...
- minimaxir 11mo agoI just finished my Flux 2 testing (focusing on the Pro variant here: https://replicate.com/black-forest-labs/flux-2-pro https://replicate.com/black-forest-labs/flux-2-pro). Overall, it's a tough sell to use Flux 2 over Nano Banana for the same use cases, but even if Nano Banana didn't exist it's only an iterative improvement over Flux 1.1 Pro. Some notes: - Running my nuanced Nano Banana prompts though Flux 2, Flux 2 definitely has better prompt adherence than Flux 1.1, but in all cases the image quality was worse/more obviously AI generated. - The prompting guide for Flux 2 (https://docs.bfl.ai/guides/prompting_guide_flux2 https://docs.bfl.ai/guides/prompting_guide_flux2) encourages JSON prompting by default, which is new for an image generation model that has the text encoder to support it. It also encourages hex color prompting, which I've verified works. - Prompt upsampling is an option, but it's one that's pushed in the documentation (https://github.com/black-forest-labs/flux2/blob/main/docs/flux2_with_prompt_upsampling.md https://github.com/black-forest-labs/flux2/blob/main/docs/fl...). This does allow the model to deductively reason, e.g. if asked to generate an image of a Fibonacci implementation in Python it will fail hilariously if prompt sampling is disabled, but get somewhere if it's enabled: https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1993361220595044793 https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1993361220595044793 - The Flux 2 API will flag anything tangently related to IP as sensentive even at its lowest sensitivity level, which is different from Flux 1.1 API. If you enable prompt upsampling, it won't get flagged, but the results are...unexpected. https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1993365968605864010 https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1993365968605864010 - Costwise and generation-speed-wise, Flux 2 Pro is on par with Nano Banana, and adding an image as an input pushes the cost of Flux 2 Pro higher than Nano Banana. The cost discrepancy increases if you try to utilize the advertised multi-image reference feature. - Testing Flux 1.1 vs. Flux 2 generations does not result in objective winners, particularly around more abstract generations.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- vunderba 11mo agoI've re-run my benchmark with the Flux 2 Pro model and found that in some cases the higher resolution models (I believe Flux 2 Pro handles 4k) can actually backfire on some of the tests because it'll introduce the equivalent of an almost ESRGAN style upscale which may add in unwanted additional details. (See the Constanza test in particular). https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing
- vunderba 11mo agoUpdating the GenAI comparison website is starting to feel a bit Sisyphean with all the new models coming out lately, but the results are in for the Flux 2 Pro Editing model! https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing It scored slightly higher than BFL's Kontext model, coming in around the middle of the pack at 6 / 12 points. I’ll also be introducing an additional numerical metric soon, so we can add more nuance to how we evaluate model quality as they continue to improve. If you're solely interested in seeing how Flux 2 Pro stacks up against the Nano Banana Pro, and another Black Forest model (Kontext), see here: https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing?models=km,nbp,f2p https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing?models=km,nbp... Note: It should be called out that BFL seems to support a more formalized JSON structure for more granular edits so I'm wondering if accuracy would improve using it.
- echelon 11mo agoHow much energy does BFL have to keep playing this game against Google and ByteDance (SeeDream)? If their new fancy model is only middle of the pack, and they're not as open source as the Chinese Qwen image models (or ByteDance / Alibaba / Lightricks video models), what's the point? It's not just prompt adherence, the image quality of Flux models has been pretty bad. Plastic skin, inhumanely chiseled chins, that general faux "AI" aura. Indeed, the Flux samples in your test suite that "pass" look God-awful. It might "pass" from a technical standpoint, but there's no way I'd choose Flux to solve my workflows. It looks bad. (I wonder if they lack people on their data team with good aesthetic taste. It may be as simple as that.) I think this company is struggling. They're pinned between Google and the Chinese. It's a tough, unenviable spot to be in. I think a lot of the foundation model companies in media are having a really hard time: RunwayML, PikaLabs, LumaLabs. Some of them have pivoted hard away from solving media for everyone. I don't think they can beat the deep-pocketed hyperscalers or the Chinese ecosystem. BFL just raised a massive round, so what do I know? I just can't help but feel that even though Runway raised similar money, they're struggling really hard now. And I would really not want to be fighting against Google who is already ahead in the game.
- latentspacer 11mo ago
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- bossyTeacher 11mo agoGenuine question, does anyone use any of these text to image models regularly for non trivial tasks? I am curious to know how they get used. It literally seems like there is a new model reaching the top 3 every week
- ThrowawayTestr 11mo agoI use them to generate very niche porn
- a96 11mo ago(I'm not really familiar with image generators.) Would you care to share how well that works? Given the heavy censorship attitudes, I wouldn't expect that to be easy.
- cedar-v 11mo ago[flagged]
- tmikaeld 11mo agoJust an FYI, the open source version FLUX.2-DEV cannot be used commercially. https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-dev/blob/main/LICENSE.txt https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-dev/blob/mai...
- dragonwriter 11mo ago> open source version [...] cannot be used commercially So, it’s not open source.
- hermitcrab 11mo agoI spent 2 minutes on the website and I still don't know what it is. Generative AI? An image editor?
- yapyap 11mo agodefinitely gen. ai
- jonplackett 11mo agoBeen trying this and found it to be fantastic. Much more naturalist images than Gemini or ChatGPT and great level of understanding.