Enlarge / AI-generated image by FLUX.1 dev: "A beautiful queen of the universe holding up her hands, face in the background." (credit: FLUX.1)

On Thursday, AI-startup Black Forest Labs announced the launch of its company and the release of its first suite of text-to-image AI models, called FLUX.1. The German-based company, founded by researchers who developed the technology behind Stable Diffusion and invented the latent diffusion technique, aims to create advanced generative AI for images and videos.

The launch of FLUX.1 comes about seven weeks after Stability AI's troubled release of Stable Diffusion 3 Medium in mid-June. Stability AI's offering faced widespread criticism among image-synthesis hobbyists for its poor performance in generating human anatomy, with users sharing examples of distorted limbs and bodies across social media. That problematic launch followed the earlier departure of three key engineers from Stability AI—Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Dominik Lorenz—who went on to found Black Forest Labs along with latent diffusion co-developer Patrick Esser and others.

Black Forest Labs launched with the release of three FLUX.1 text-to-image models: a high-end commercial "pro" version, a mid-range "dev" version with open weights for non-commercial use, and a faster open-weights "schnell" version ("schnell" means quick or fast in German). Black Forest Labs claims its models outperform existing options like Midjourney and DALL-E in areas such as image quality and adherence to text prompts.