Rombach et al: FLUX.1 [pro|dev|schnell], $31m seed for Black Forest Labs

**Stability AI** co-founder Rombach launched **FLUX.1**, a new text-to-image model with three variants: pro (API only), dev (open-weight, non-commercial), and schnell (Apache 2.0). FLUX.1 outperforms **Midjourney** and **Ideogram** based on Black Forest Labs' ELO score and plans to expand into text-to-video. **Google DeepMind** released **Gemma-2 2B**, a 2 billion parameter open-source model that outperforms larger models like **GPT-3.5-Turbo-0613** and **Mixtral-8x7b** on Chatbot Arena, optimized with NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM. The release includes safety classifiers (ShieldGemma) and sparse autoencoder analysis (Gemma Scope). Discussions highlight benchmarking discrepancies and US government support for open-weight AI models. Critiques of AI coding tools' productivity gains were also noted.