Flux.1 is a Mind-Blowing Open-Weights AI Image Generator with 12B Parameters

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses the release of Flux.1, a new open-weight image model that claims to surpass industry giants like Midjourney V6, DALL-E 3, and Stable Diffusion 3 Ultra in terms of image quality and performance. It provides an overview of the Flux.1 model variants, their capabilities, and the background of the team behind the technology.

🙋 Q&A

[01] Overview of Flux.1

1. What are the key features and capabilities of the Flux.1 model?

• Flux.1 is a suite of text-to-image models that define a new state-of-the-art in image detail, prompt adherence, style diversity, and scene complexity for text-to-image synthesis.
• It comes in three variants: Flux.1 Pro, Flux.1 Dev, and Flux.1 Schnell, each with different performance characteristics and licensing.
• All Flux.1 models use a mix of multimodal and parallel diffusion transformer blocks and have 12 billion parameters.
• The models perform better and use hardware more efficiently by using rotary positional embeddings and parallel attention layers.

2. How does Flux.1 compare to other popular text-to-image models?

• According to the researchers, Flux.1 Pro and Flux.1 Dev surpass models like Midjourney v6.0, DALL-E 3, and Stable Diffusion 3 Ultra in terms of visual quality, prompt coherence, size and aspect variability, typography, and output diversity.

[02] Accessing and Using Flux.1

1. How can users access and try out the Flux.1 models?

• There are several free options available, including Replicate, Fal.ai, and HuggingFace, which provide demos and examples of Flux.1 in action.
• Flux.1 Pro can also be accessed via an API, but access is currently limited to selected partners.

2. What are the licensing and commercial use considerations for the different Flux.1 variants?

• Flux.1 Pro supports commercial use, but access is limited to selected partners.
• Flux.1 Dev is restricted to non-commercial use only.
• Flux.1 Schnell is openly available under an Apache 2.0 license, allowing for both personal and commercial use.

[03] Technical Considerations

1. What are the hardware requirements for running the Flux.1 models?

• The open-weight nature of the Flux.1 models requires significant computing power, typically an A100 GPU or better, due to the large model size of 12 billion parameters.
• This makes it challenging for most consumer-grade hardware to run the models locally alongside a large language model (LLM).

2. What are the future prospects for the Flux.1 models?

• The author is excited to see the community work on tuning, training, and extending the step-distilled Apache 2.0 version of Flux.1 Schnell, which could lead to the development of amazing, fine-tuned models.
• The author plans to compare Flux.1 with other popular text-to-image models like Midjourney, DALL-E 3, and Gemini 2, as well as provide a guide on how to run Flux.1 Schnell on a local machine.