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FLUX.2: Frontier Visual Intelligence

bfl.ai

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Re: FLUX.2: Frontier Visual Intelligence

#81

Post by BoorishBears »

loudmax wrote: post #64
minimaxir wrote: post #41

I just finished my Flux 2 testing (focusing on the Pro variant here: https://replicate.com/black-forest-labs/flux-2-pro ). Overall, it's a tough sell to use Flux 2 over Nano Banana for the same use cases, but even if Nano Banana didn't exist it's only an iterative improvement over Flux 1.1 Pro. Some notes: - Running my nuanced Nano Banana prompts though Flux 2, Flux 2 definitely has better prompt adherence than Flux…

The fact that you have the possibility of running Flux locally might be enough of an argument to sway the balance for some cases. For example, if you've already set up a workflow and Google jacks up the price, or changes the API, you have no choice but to go along. If BFL does the same, you at least have the option of running locally.

Their testing was for the Pro model, which you cannot host locally, and is already not price competitive with Google's offering for the capabilities.

Re: FLUX.2: Frontier Visual Intelligence

#82

Post by latentspacer »

echelon wrote: post #76
vunderba wrote: post #43

Updating the GenAI comparison website is starting to feel a bit Sisyphean with all the new models coming out lately, but the results are in for the Flux 2 Pro Editing model! https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing It scored slightly higher than BFL's Kontext model, coming in around the middle of the pack at 6 / 12 points. I’ll also be introducing an additional numerical metric soon, so we can add more nuance t…

How much energy does BFL have to keep playing this game against Google and ByteDance (SeeDream)? If their new fancy model is only middle of the pack, and they're not as open source as the Chinese Qwen image models (or ByteDance / Alibaba / Lightricks video models), what's the point? It's not just prompt adherence, the image quality of Flux models has been pretty bad. Plastic skin, inhumanely chiseled chins, that gene…

i may be wrong, but it doesn't seem like BFL is struggling to me. they were apparently founded in august 2024, and have already signed $100M+ revenue deals with customers like meta (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-09/meta-to-p...)

in fact, it seems like BFL has benefited a lot by becoming the go-to alternative for big enterprise customers who don't want to be dependent on google

Re: FLUX.2: Frontier Visual Intelligence

#83

Post by echelon »

latentspacer wrote: post #82
echelon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much energy does BFL have to keep playing this game against Google and ByteDance (SeeDream)? If their new fancy model is only middle of the pack, and they're not as open source as the Chinese Qwen image models (or ByteDance / Alibaba / Lightricks video models), what's the point? It's not just prompt adherence, the image quality of Flux models has been pretty bad. Plastic skin, inhumanely chiseled chins, that gene…

i may be wrong, but it doesn't seem like BFL is struggling to me. they were apparently founded in august 2024, and have already signed $100M+ revenue deals with customers like meta ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-09/meta-to-p... ) in fact, it seems like BFL has benefited a lot by becoming the go-to alternative for big enterprise customers who don't want to be dependent on google

Wow, I didn't hear about this. That's impressive, and kudos to the team.

That's why they raised the massive round, then.

But this just leads to more questions - I have to wonder if and for how long this is just going to be to plug in a gap for Meta's own AI product offering. At some point they'll want to build their own in-house models or perhaps just acquire BFL. Zuckerberg would not be printing AI data centers if that wasn't the case.

From a PLG standpoint, Flux isn't really what graphics designers are choosing for their work. The generations look worse than OpenAI's "piss filter". But aesthetics might not be the play the team is going after.

Hopefully they don't just raise all of this dry powder energy and burn it trying to race Google. They should start listening to designers and get in their good graces if their intent is to build tools for art and graphics design work.

A good press release would consist of lots of good looking images and a video of workflows that save artists time. This press release doesn't connect with graphics designers at all and it reads as if they aren't even the audience.

If it's something else, more "enterprise", that BFL is after, then maybe I don't know the strategy or game plan.

Re: FLUX.2: Frontier Visual Intelligence

#84

Post by vunderba »

echelon wrote: post #76
vunderba wrote: post #43

Updating the GenAI comparison website is starting to feel a bit Sisyphean with all the new models coming out lately, but the results are in for the Flux 2 Pro Editing model! https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing It scored slightly higher than BFL's Kontext model, coming in around the middle of the pack at 6 / 12 points. I’ll also be introducing an additional numerical metric soon, so we can add more nuance t…

How much energy does BFL have to keep playing this game against Google and ByteDance (SeeDream)? If their new fancy model is only middle of the pack, and they're not as open source as the Chinese Qwen image models (or ByteDance / Alibaba / Lightricks video models), what's the point? It's not just prompt adherence, the image quality of Flux models has been pretty bad. Plastic skin, inhumanely chiseled chins, that gene…

Sadly, I tend to agree. I'm rooting for BFL, but the results from this latest model (the Pro version, of all things) have just been a bit disappointing. Google’s release of NB Pro last week certainly didn’t help either, since it set the bar so incredibly high.

Flux 2 Pro only scored a single point higher than the Kontext models they released over half a year ago.

The text-to-image side was even more frustrating. It often felt like it was actively fighting me, as evidenced by the high number of re-rolls required before it passed some of the tests (Cubed⁵, for example).

Re: FLUX.2: Frontier Visual Intelligence

#85

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

echelon wrote: post #78
liuliu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a startup, they pivoted and focused on image models (they are model providers, and image models often have more use cases than video models, not to mention they continue to have bigger image dataset moat, not video).

> bigger image dataset moat If they have so much data, then why do Flux model outputs look so God-awful bad? They have plastic skin, weird chins, and have that "AI" aura. Not the good AI aura, mind you. The cheap automated YouTube video kind that you immediately skip. Flux 2 seems to suffer from the exact same problems. Midjourney is ancient. Their CEO is off trying to build a 3D volume and dating companion or some n…

>Even SDXL looks better, and that's a literal dinosaur.

I’m not saying you are wrong in effect, but for reference just slightly over 2 years ago was SDZL released, and it took about a year to have great fine tunes.

Re: FLUX.2: Frontier Visual Intelligence

#86

Post by latentspacer »

echelon wrote: post #83
latentspacer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i may be wrong, but it doesn't seem like BFL is struggling to me. they were apparently founded in august 2024, and have already signed $100M+ revenue deals with customers like meta ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-09/meta-to-p... ) in fact, it seems like BFL has benefited a lot by becoming the go-to alternative for big enterprise customers who don't want to be dependent on google

Wow, I didn't hear about this. That's impressive, and kudos to the team. That's why they raised the massive round, then. But this just leads to more questions - I have to wonder if and for how long this is just going to be to plug in a gap for Meta's own AI product offering. At some point they'll want to build their own in-house models or perhaps just acquire BFL. Zuckerberg would not be printing AI data centers if t…

idk it seems pretty clear BFL’s target market is developers not graphic designers. and for developers at scale like Meta and Adobe, it’s pretty incredible a tiny startup like BFL has become the primary alternative to Google with 1/100th of the resources within 12 months of their founding, doing hundreds of millions of revenue

the Chinese models are great, but no serious enterprise developer is going to bet their image workloads at scale in production on Chinese models if the market evolves anything like past developer infrastructure

Re: FLUX.2: Frontier Visual Intelligence

#87

Post by latentspacer »

andersa wrote: post #44
spyder wrote: post #18

Great, especially that they still have an open-weight variant of this new model too. But what happened to their work on their unreleased SOTA video model? did it stop being SOTA, others got ahead, and they folded the project, or what? YT video about it: https://youtu.be/svIHNnM1Pa0?t=208 They even removed the page of that: https://bfl.ai/up-next/

I heard a possibly unsubstantiated rumor that they had a major failed training run with the video model and canceled the project.

lol, unless I’m wrong, that is not how model development works

a ‘major training run’ only becomes major after you sample from it iteratively every few thousand steps, check its good, fix your pipeline, then continue

almost by design, major training runs don’t fail

if I had to guess, like most labs. they’ve probably had to reallocate more time and energy to their image models than expected since the AI image editing market has exploded in size this year, and will do video later

Re: FLUX.2: Frontier Visual Intelligence

#90

Post by shikon7 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #27

We probably won't be able to run it on regular PCs, even with a 5090. So I am curious how good the results will be using a quntized version.

You can run it with a 5090 and the standard ComfyUI template, it just offloads some parts to RAM. Image generation takes about a minute for sizes like 1024x1024.
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