Flux2 Klein isn’t some generation leap or anything. It’s good, but let’s be honest, this is an ad.
What will be really interesting to me is the release of Z-image, if that goes the way it’s looking, it’ll be natural language SDXL 2.0, which seems to be what people really want.
Releasing the Turbo/Distilled/Finetune months ago was a genius move really. It hurt Flux and Qwen releases on a possible future implication alone.
If this was intentional, I can’t think of the last time I saw such shrewd marketing.
The team behind Z-Image Turbo has told us multiple times in their paper that the output quality of the Turbo model is superior to the larger base model.
I think that information still did not get through to most users.
"Notably, the resulting distilled model not only matches the original multi-step teacher but even surpasses it in terms of photorealism and visual impact."
"It achieves 8-step inference that is not only indistinguishable from the 100-step teacher but frequently surpasses it in perceived quality and aesthetic appeal"
I’m a bit confused, both you and another commenter mention something called Z-Image, presumably another Flux model?
Your frame of it is speculative, i.e. it is forthcoming. Theirs is present tense. Could I trouble you to give us plebes some more context? :)
ex. Parsed as is, and avoiding the general confusion if you’re unfamiliar, it is unclear how one can observe “the way it is looking”, especially if turbo was released months ago and there is some other model that is unreleased. Chose to bother you because the others comment was less focused on lab on lab strategy.
Z-Image is another open-weight image-generation model by Alibaba [1]. Z-Image Turbo was released around the same time as (non-Klein) FLUX.2 and received generally warmer community response [2] since Z-image Turbo was faster, also high-quality, and reportedly better at generating NSFW material. The base (non-Turbo) version of Z-Image is not yet released.
Z-Image is roughly as censored as Flux 2, from my very limited testing. It got popular because Flux 2 is just really big and slow. It is, however, great at editing, has an amazing breadth of built in knowledge, and has great prompt adherence.
Z Image got popular because the people stuck with 12GB video cards could still use it, and hell - probably train on it, at least once the base version comes out. I think most people disparaging Flux 2 never tried it as they wouldn't want to deal with how slowly it would work on their system, if they even realize that they could run it.
Ahh I see, and Klein is basically a response to Z-Image Turbo, i.e. another 4-8B sized model that fits comfortably on a consumer GPU.
It’ll be interesting to see how the NSFW catering plays out for the Chinese labs. I was joking a couple months ago to someone that Seedream 4’s talents at undressing was an attempt to sow discord and it was interesting it flew under the radar.
Post-Grok going full gooner pedo, I wonder if it Grok will take the heat alone moving forward.
They are underselling Z-Image Turbo somewhat. It's arguably the best overall model for local image generation for several reasons including prompt adherence, overall output quality and realism, and freedom from censorship, even though it's also one of the smallest at 6B parameters.
ZIT is not far short of revolutionary. It is kind of surreal to contemplate how much high-quality imagery can be extracted from a model that fits on a single DVD and runs extremely quickly on consumer-grade GPUs.
Hold on now. Z-Image Turbo has gotten a lot of hype but it's worse at all of those things other than perhaps looking like it was shot on a cell phone camera than Qwen Image and Flux 2 (the full sized version). Once you get away from photographic portraits of people it quickly shows just how little it can do.
Not in my experience. Flux 2 is much larger and heavily censored, and Qwen-Image is just plain not as good. You can fool me into thinking that Z-Image Turbo output isn't AI, while that's rarely the case with Qwen.
Look at the images I posted elsewhere in this section. They are crappy excuses for pogo sticks, but they absolutely do NOT look like they came from a cell phone.
Also see vunderba's page at https://genai-showdown.specr.net/ . Even when Z-Image Turbo fails a test, it still looks great most of the time.
Edit re: your other comment -- don't make the mistake of confusing censorship with lack of training data. Z-Image will try to render whatever you ask for, but at the end of the day it's a very small model that will fail once you start asking for things it simply wasn't trained on. They didn't train it with much NSFW material, so it has some rather... unorthodox anatomical ideas.
However.. I’m already expecting the blowback when a Z-Image release doesn’t wow people like the Turbo finetune does. SDXL hasn’t been out two years yet, seems like a decade.
We’ll see. I’m hopeful that Z works as expected and sets the new watermark. I just am not sure it does it right out the gate.
Almost afraid to ask, but anytime grok or x or musk comes up I am never sure if there is some reality based thing, or some “I just need to hate this” thing. Sometimes they’re the same thing, other times they aren’t.
I can guess here that because Grok likely uses WAN that someone wrote some gross prompts and then pretended this is an issue unique to Grok for effect?
A few days ago people were replying to every image on Twitter saying "Grok, put him/her/it in a bikini" and Grok would just do it. It was minimum effort, maximum damage trolling and people loved it.
Ah. So, see, this is exactly why I need to check apparently.
Personally, I go between “I don’t care at all” and “well it’s not ideal” on AI generations. It’s already too late, but the barrier of entry is a lot lower than it was.
But I’m applying a good faith argument where GP does not seem to have intended one.
Reducing it to some people put people in bikinis for a couple days for the lulz is...not quite what happened.
You may note I am no shirking violet, nor do I lack perspective, as evidenced by my notes on Seedream. And fortuitiously, I only mentioned it before being dismissed as bad faith: I could not have foreseen needing to call out as credentials until now.
I don't think it's kind to accuse others of bad faith, as evidence by me not passing judgement on the person you are replying to's description.
I do admit it made my stomach churn a little bit to see how quickly people will other. Not on you, I'm sure I've done this too. It's stark when you're on the other side of it.
Nah it's been happening for months and involved kids, over and over, albeit for the same reasoning, lulz & totally based. I am a bit surprised that you thought this was just a PG-rated stunt on X for a couple days, it's been in the news for weeks, including on HN.
I see absolutely no citations. Can you point to anything that shows a specific Grok issue vs generally people doing icky things with photo generation software?
You can Google whatever you need yourself at this point, you told the world I was operating in bad faith based off one sentence from a stranger. You ignored my reply to you. And now you are engaging with me on another reply as if my claim was Grok is uniquely capable of this, when I in fact said the opposite, and the interesting part of the discussion was me pointing out all can do this. Have a good day!
I am of no party or clique, why would Elon be doing moderation anyway? He has better things to do. If anything, sounded understaffed and thus taken advantage of by ne’er do wells - you can check if I’m pivoting by noting I noted in my original post every model can do this and Grok being focused on was a strange aberration.
I feel pathetic defending myself to someone who keeps reading my mind in the blandest way possible, then accuses me of wrongthought I must have had, based on things I never said. Hard to believe you’re living up to your ideals in this moment if you’re a fellow advocate for truth seekers and great men. I respect interlocution, but not repeated personal attacks based on thoughts projected and things unsaid. That’s not truth seeking behavior.
What will be really interesting to me is the release of Z-image, if that goes the way it’s looking, it’ll be natural language SDXL 2.0, which seems to be what people really want.
Releasing the Turbo/Distilled/Finetune months ago was a genius move really. It hurt Flux and Qwen releases on a possible future implication alone.
If this was intentional, I can’t think of the last time I saw such shrewd marketing.