Comment by SV_BubbleTime
1 day ago
Flux2 Klein isn’t some generation leap or anything. It’s good, but let’s be honest, this is an ad.
What will be really interesting to me is the release of Z-image, if that goes the way it’s looking, it’ll be natural language SDXL 2.0, which seems to be what people really want.
Releasing the Turbo/Distilled/Finetune months ago was a genius move really. It hurt Flux and Qwen releases on a possible future implication alone.
If this was intentional, I can’t think of the last time I saw such shrewd marketing.
The team behind Z-Image Turbo has told us multiple times in their paper that the output quality of the Turbo model is superior to the larger base model.
I think that information still did not get through to most users.
"Notably, the resulting distilled model not only matches the original multi-step teacher but even surpasses it in terms of photorealism and visual impact."
"It achieves 8-step inference that is not only indistinguishable from the 100-step teacher but frequently surpasses it in perceived quality and aesthetic appeal"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22699
It's important for finetuning, Lora training and as a refiner...
I also heard so, that it would mainly be useful for training and applying the resulting Lora to the distilled Turbo model.
However, I wonder what has been the source of the delay with its release and if there were problems with that approach.
I’m a bit confused, both you and another commenter mention something called Z-Image, presumably another Flux model?
Your frame of it is speculative, i.e. it is forthcoming. Theirs is present tense. Could I trouble you to give us plebes some more context? :)
ex. Parsed as is, and avoiding the general confusion if you’re unfamiliar, it is unclear how one can observe “the way it is looking”, especially if turbo was released months ago and there is some other model that is unreleased. Chose to bother you because the others comment was less focused on lab on lab strategy.
Z-Image is another open-weight image-generation model by Alibaba [1]. Z-Image Turbo was released around the same time as (non-Klein) FLUX.2 and received generally warmer community response [2] since Z-image Turbo was faster, also high-quality, and reportedly better at generating NSFW material. The base (non-Turbo) version of Z-Image is not yet released.
[1] https://tongyi-mai.github.io/Z-Image-blog/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1p9uu69/no...
Z-Image is roughly as censored as Flux 2, from my very limited testing. It got popular because Flux 2 is just really big and slow. It is, however, great at editing, has an amazing breadth of built in knowledge, and has great prompt adherence.
Z Image got popular because the people stuck with 12GB video cards could still use it, and hell - probably train on it, at least once the base version comes out. I think most people disparaging Flux 2 never tried it as they wouldn't want to deal with how slowly it would work on their system, if they even realize that they could run it.
Ahh I see, and Klein is basically a response to Z-Image Turbo, i.e. another 4-8B sized model that fits comfortably on a consumer GPU.
It’ll be interesting to see how the NSFW catering plays out for the Chinese labs. I was joking a couple months ago to someone that Seedream 4’s talents at undressing was an attempt to sow discord and it was interesting it flew under the radar.
Post-Grok going full gooner pedo, I wonder if it Grok will take the heat alone moving forward.
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