FLUX.1 (Black Forest Labs)

Black Forest Labs — founded by former Stability AI researchers including Robin Rombach who created Stable Diffusion — launched FLUX.1 in 2024 as an open-weight model that outperformed Midjourney V6 on human anatomy and prompt adherence in third-party evaluations. Its three variants (FLUX.1 [pro], [dev], and [schnell]) offered different speed/quality tradeoffs, with the schnell variant generating images in 4 steps.