Black Forest Labs, the AI startup whose fashions as soon as powered the image generation features of X’s Grok chatbot, on Thursday launched a brand new suite of image-generating fashions — a few of which may each create and edit pics.
Probably the most able to the fashions within the new household, known as Flux.1 Kontext, may be prompted with textual content and, optionally, a reference picture to create new photographs, writes Black Forest Labs in a blog post.
“The Flux.1 Kontext fashions ship state-of-the-art picture era outcomes with robust immediate following, photorealistic rendering, and aggressive typography — all at inference speeds as much as 8x sooner than present main fashions,” the corporate writes in its publish.
Flux.1 Kontext comes because the race to construct aggressive picture mills heats up. Google debuted its newest image-generating mannequin, Imagen 4, earlier this month on the firm’s I/O developer convention. Earlier this 12 months, OpenAI introduced a vastly improved image-generating mannequin to ChatGPT — a mannequin that shortly went viral for its potential to create artwork within the fashion of Studio Ghibli films.
There are two fashions within the Flux.1 Kontext household: Flux.1 Kontex [pro] and Flux.1 Kontex [max]. The previous permits customers to generate a picture and refine it by a number of “turns,” all whereas preserving the characters and types within the photographs. Flux.1 Kontex [max] focuses on pace, consistency, and adherence to prompts.
Not like a few of Black Forest Labs’ earlier fashions, Flux.1 Kontex [pro] and Flux.1 Kontex [max] can’t be downloaded for offline use. Nonetheless, Black Forest Labs is making an “open” Kontext mannequin, Flux.1 Kontext [dev], out there in non-public beta for analysis and security testing.
Black Forest Labs can also be launching a mannequin playground that permits customers to strive its fashions with out having to join a third-party service. New customers get 200 credit, sufficient to generate round 12 photographs with Flux.1 Kontex [pro].
Black Forest Labs, primarily based in Germany, was said to be in talks to boost $100 million at a $1 billion valuation towards the top of final 12 months. Most of the founders hail from Stability AI, the creator of the infamous Steady Diffusion image-generating mannequin. Backers embody Andreessen Horowitz, Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, and Y Combinator’s Garry Tan.
Within the months because it emerged from stealth, Black Forest Labs has launched a lot of new image-generating fashions and enterprise-focused companies, together with an API.
