Black Forest Labs, a startup founded by former developers from Stability.ai, aims to shape the future of generative AI. Based in Wilmington, North Carolina, the company has already raised $31 million in early funding, with backing from prominent tech investor Andreessen Horowitz.

The startup develops cutting-edge deep learning models for image and video generation and plans to make these models available as open-source, increasing accessibility and trust in the technology. Their first model family, Flux.1, is described as the „new state of the art“ in text-to-image synthesis, offering versions for both commercial and non-commercial use.

Black Forest Labs emphasizes that their models surpass existing solutions like Midjourney v6.0 and DALL-E 3 in various benchmarks. With Flux.1 [pro] as the most powerful model and Flux.1 [dev] available for non-commercial use, promising results are expected in terms of image details, scene complexity, and stylistic diversity. A faster version, Flux.1 [fast], is available for personal use.

In addition to image generators, the company also plans to develop a video generator named SOTA, which is expected to be the best of its kind. This move underscores Black Forest Labs‘ goal of developing leading AI technologies that can be used worldwide.

The founding team, which left Stability.ai earlier this year, is driven by the vision of bringing state-of-the-art AI from Europe to the world. With strong financial backing and ambitious plans, Black Forest Labs could become a significant player in the generative AI space.

Key Points:

• Black Forest Labs develops generative AI models for image and video.
• Initial funding round raised $31 million.
• Models already outperform well-known AI tools in various benchmarks.
• The company also plans to develop an advanced video generator.

Would you like to try out the Flux.1 versions? Here is the link to Replicate