Black Forest Labs, the AI startup whose fashions as soon as powered the picture technology options of X’s Grok chatbot, on Thursday launched a brand new suite of image-generating fashions — a few of which might each create and edit pics.
Essentially the most able to the fashions within the new household, known as Flux.1 Kontext, will be prompted with textual content and, optionally, a reference picture to create new pictures, writes Black Forest Labs in a blog post.
“The Flux.1 Kontext fashions ship state-of-the-art picture technology outcomes with sturdy immediate following, photorealistic rendering, and aggressive typography — all at inference speeds as much as 8x quicker than present main fashions,” the corporate writes in its put up.
Flux.1 Kontext comes because the race to construct aggressive picture turbines heats up. Google debuted its newest image-generating mannequin, Imagen 4, earlier this month on the firm’s I/O developer convention. Earlier this yr, OpenAI introduced a vastly improved image-generating mannequin to ChatGPT — a mannequin that rapidly went viral for its capacity to create artwork within the type of Studio Ghibli films.
There’s 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 way of a number of “turns,” all whereas preserving the characters and kinds within the pictures. Flux.1 Kontex [max] focuses on pace, consistency, and adherence to prompts.
In contrast to 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], obtainable in personal beta for analysis and security testing.
Black Forest Labs can be launching a mannequin playground that enables customers to attempt its fashions with out having to enroll in a third-party service. New customers get 200 credit, sufficient to generate round 12 pictures with Flux.1 Kontex [pro].
Black Forest Labs, based mostly in Germany, was mentioned to be in talks to lift $100 million at a $1 billion valuation towards the tip of final yr. 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 various new image-generating fashions and enterprise-focused companies together with an API.