Yesterday, August 1st, an announcement caught everyone by suprise. Nobody was really expecting it. And now everyone is talking about it, downloading its huge model files and testing it.

FLUX was announced yesterday by the Black Forest Labs team. They are the guys behind Stable Diffusion, who left Stability AI few months ago, right before SD3 came out, so they have the know-how for sure.

“Flux, the largest SOTA open source text-to-image model to date, developed by Black Forest Labs—the original team behind Stable Diffusion is now available on fal. Flux pushes the boundaries of creativity and performance with an impressive 12B parameters, delivering aesthetics reminiscent of Midjourney.“

There are three releases:

1. “Dev” – The base model, open-sourced with a non-commercial license.
2. “Schnell” (schnell is german for fast) – A distilled version of the base model that operates up to 10 times faster.
3. “Pro” – A closed-source version only available through API.

The basic release (Schnell) is comparable to the new Midjourney v.6, while the Dev one and the Pro are way better, here is the comparison chart:

Right now everyone is testing it as it is available online on different websites ( for example here: https://replicate.com/black-forest-labs/flux-dev ) or you can download all the files you need to run it on ComfyUI following this short guide (https://comfyanonymous.github.io/ComfyUI_examples/flux/), but be careful: the files are really BIG (23Gb the Unet, 4,8 Gb or 9.6Gb the fp8 or the fp16 clips).

You also will need a good GPU (RTX 3 or above with at least 8Gb Vram is the bare minimum!) to run FLUX locally, and a lot of ram.

It’s a new model, so there are no checkpoints or lora’s around yet, so you can just practive with the prompt and the other few settings available at the moment.

One thing is sure: this new AI generative model is BIG, it works great and it’s free. So, if you have a decent PC I suggest you to download the files for ComfyUI and start playing with it. It’s worth every Gb of disk and ram space!

Here is one of my first test with FLUX:

Stay tuned… there is more to come for sure!

Keep reading my Blog to stay updated!