Forget Midjourney — Flux is the new king of AI image generation and here’s how to get access (2024)

New AI products and services come in two ways; like a bolt of lightning with no warning, or after months of constant hype. Flux, by startup Black Forest Labs, was the former.

The AI image generation model is being dubbed the rightful heir to Stable Diffusion and it quickly went viral after its release with direct comparisons to market leader Midjourney.

The difference between Flux and Midjourney is that Flux is open-source and can run on a reasonably good laptop. This means it is, or will, also be available on many of the same multi-model platforms like Poe, Nightcafe and FreePik as Stable Diffusion.

I’ve been using it and my initial impressions are that in some areas it is better than Midjourney, especially around rendering people, but its skin textures aren’t as good as Midjourney v6.1.

What is Flux and where did it come from?

Flux came from AI startup Black Forest Labs. This new company was founded by some of the people responsible for most modern AI image generation technologies.

The German-based company is led by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann and Dominik Lorenz, all former engineers at Stability AI, along with other leading figures in the development of diffusion-based AI models. This is the technology that also powers many AI video tools.

There are three versions of Flux.01 currently available, all text-to-image models. The first is a Pro version with a commercial license and is mainly used by companies like FreePik to offer its subscribers access to generative AI image technology.

The next two are Dev and Schnell. These are the mid-weight and fast models and in my tests —running on a laptop with an RTX 4090 —they outperform Midjourney, DALL-E and even Ideogram in adherence to the prompt, image quality and text rendering on an image.

The company is also working on a text-to-video model that it promises will offer high-quality output and be available open-source. Branding it: “State-of-the-Art Text to Video for all.”

Where can I use Flux today?

If you have a well-equipped laptop you can download and run Flux.01 locally. There are some easy ways to do this including by using the Pinokio launcher. This makes it relatively trivial to install and run AI models with a couple of clicks and is free to use. It is a large file though.

However, if you’re machine isn’t up to the job there are several websites already offering access to Flux.01 and in some cases, this includes the largest commercial Pro model.

NightCafe, which is one of my favorite AI image platforms, already has access to the model and you could quickly compare that o images from other tools like Ideogram and Stable Diffusion 3.

Poe, the AI model platform, has access to Flux.01 and lets you generate the images in a chatbot-style format similar to creating pictures using tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E.

You can also get access through platforms more typically targeted at developers including Based Labs, Hugging Face and Fal.ai. FreePik, one of the largest AI image platforms on the market says it is also working to bring Flux to its site.

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