China has overtaken the United States in the global market for open artificial-intelligence models, marking a pivotal moment in the race to shape the future of the technology. A joint...
tickles me to death what just happened with the release of flux 2 and z-image turbo.
flux2 is a gigantic over-bloated slow mehburger, but was the first new release of a somewhat usable image model in a good while, except of course it was the distilled version that they hoped would be just good enough to get people to pay for their “pro” api.
then 1 day later alibaba releases z-image-turbo which does WAY better images and takes about 25% of the resources and time to operate causing everyone to immediately forget and abandon flux 2. not to mention they said they’ll be releasing the full non-distilled model in the next week or so, so it will be drive flux 2’s grave even deeper.
american companies have no chance in this area at all. yet they’re still pretending that spending millions on bloated, censored, and gatekept models is the path forward
Oh yeah, it was hilarious to watch on reddit where people were amazed at flux2 quality, and then z-image comes out and everybody forgets about flux cause they can actually run z-image and it’s not censored either. I don’t even understand wtf American companies are doing at this point, it’s as if they don’t understand their business model is gone.
I guess maybe they’re trying to lobby to ban Chinese models in US, but that’s gonna be a pretty tough sell at this point. These models are open source, so you can’t make the argument that they send data to China, and a bunch of US companies are now dependent on them, so now there’s a direct commercial interest too. Like fucking Amazon uses Qwen, they’re obviously going to fight to keep using it.
flux.dev is/was nice, but it was also the only one they allowed to be used locally. I guess their business model was to allow a small version for consumer use and hope it provides free marketing? I don’t really see the point of even running flux dev now since we have z-image, though it does seem to be a bit worse at text writing (but you will probably be able to use another checkpoint for that soon if I understand how that works).
Flux is a German model and the old Stable Diffusion models where British, America is completely allergic to the concept of free locally run open source.
tickles me to death what just happened with the release of flux 2 and z-image turbo.
flux2 is a gigantic over-bloated slow mehburger, but was the first new release of a somewhat usable image model in a good while, except of course it was the distilled version that they hoped would be just good enough to get people to pay for their “pro” api.
then 1 day later alibaba releases z-image-turbo which does WAY better images and takes about 25% of the resources and time to operate causing everyone to immediately forget and abandon flux 2. not to mention they said they’ll be releasing the full non-distilled model in the next week or so, so it will be drive flux 2’s grave even deeper.
american companies have no chance in this area at all. yet they’re still pretending that spending millions on bloated, censored, and gatekept models is the path forward
Oh yeah, it was hilarious to watch on reddit where people were amazed at flux2 quality, and then z-image comes out and everybody forgets about flux cause they can actually run z-image and it’s not censored either. I don’t even understand wtf American companies are doing at this point, it’s as if they don’t understand their business model is gone.
I guess maybe they’re trying to lobby to ban Chinese models in US, but that’s gonna be a pretty tough sell at this point. These models are open source, so you can’t make the argument that they send data to China, and a bunch of US companies are now dependent on them, so now there’s a direct commercial interest too. Like fucking Amazon uses Qwen, they’re obviously going to fight to keep using it.
flux.dev is/was nice, but it was also the only one they allowed to be used locally. I guess their business model was to allow a small version for consumer use and hope it provides free marketing? I don’t really see the point of even running flux dev now since we have z-image, though it does seem to be a bit worse at text writing (but you will probably be able to use another checkpoint for that soon if I understand how that works).
yeah z-image is basically strictly superior cause the output is comparable, but the requirements are way lower
Flux is a German model and the old Stable Diffusion models where British, America is completely allergic to the concept of free locally run open source.