Releasing weights for FLUX.1 Krea

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Motivation for Releasing Weights

  • Team states goals as “hackability and recruiting”: encourage open experimentation, attract strong engineers, and align with a company ethos of controllable, creator-focused AI.
  • They explicitly say they don’t see proprietary models themselves as a deep moat; their platform also serves third‑party models.
  • Multiple commenters note this release significantly boosts their goodwill and awareness of the company.

Licensing, “Open Weights,” and Commercial Use

  • The model carries a non‑commercial, restricted license (similar to BFL Flux‑dev), which disappoints some who want full commercial freedom.
  • There’s pushback that this should be called “weights-available,” not “open weights”; the title was adjusted accordingly.
  • One commenter stresses the need for a clearly documented path for commercial usage rights.
  • Clarification: license constraints apply to the model; it’s implied generated images can be used more freely, but this is not exhaustively debated.

Architecture, Compatibility, and Model Size

  • FLUX.1 Krea is a 12B rectified flow text‑to‑image model distilled from Krea‑1, architecturally compatible with FLUX.1 dev.
  • That compatibility is meant to allow reuse of existing FLUX tooling, workflows, and many LoRAs (some work out‑of‑the‑box; others require re‑training).
  • The 23.8 GB safetensors size is explained by bfloat16 precision (~2 GB per billion parameters).

Training, Data, and Photorealism

  • Post‑training uses supervised finetuning plus RLHF-style preference data; <1M high‑quality samples can significantly improve aesthetics.
  • Data is heavily filtered by internal models and then hand‑curated; highest‑quality subsets are manually picked.
  • Photorealism and removal of the “AI/plastic look” were explicit goals, achieved via curated datasets and preference optimization.
  • Team notes a tradeoff: pushing too hard on preferences can “collapse” the model into stable but bland outputs.

Aesthetics vs Prompt Fidelity and Behavior

  • Some users find Krea less accurate to prompts than base FLUX dev (e.g., deformed bodies, off architectures), interpreting this as optimization for aesthetics over strict fidelity.
  • Authors confirm the focus was aesthetics and reducing “flux look,” not maximizing prompt adherence.
  • Model is described as somewhat “opinionated”: e.g., an “octopus DJ” tends to grow humanlike hands unless explicitly negated, and even then behavior is inconsistent.
  • External benchmarking (linked leaderboard) indicates no clear gain in prompt adherence over FLUX.1 dev, though speed and realism may be better.

Use Cases and Integration with Traditional Media

  • Stated business use cases:
    • Rapid creation of assets for Photoshop/After Effects/3D tools (e.g., diffuse maps).
    • Consistent product/character imagery for e‑commerce and fashion via personalization/LoRAs.
    • Inspiration assets for UI/UX designers (icons, layouts) refined later in Figma.
    • Marketing imagery for agencies and large companies.
    • Speculative: realistic food photos for restaurants lacking photography resources.
  • A commenter from traditional media production argues that serious adoption requires layer‑based, pipeline‑friendly tools that integrate with VFX/animation workflows; they feel most AI tools, including this, don’t yet meet professional production needs.

Tooling, Deployment, and Performance

  • Official GitHub provides inference code; commenters want more examples for finetuning/pre‑ and post‑training.
  • Model should work with existing FLUX‑compatible ecosystems; questions are raised about sd-scripts and NVIDIA‑optimized (TensorRT/RTX) versions. Team notes no RTX‑specific or ONNX build yet; future quantized (4–8 bit) checkpoints are mentioned as desirable.
  • Some users have trouble accessing the gated Hugging Face repo and mention issues with certain clients (e.g., uv).

Robotics, Languages, and Other Applications

  • For robotics: authors say the model can generate realistic scenes, but 3D engines are usually better for ground‑truth‑rich training. It might help for perception-focused tasks.
  • Users ask for better support for non‑English prompts; no detailed answer is given in the thread.
  • One commenter uses Krea and FLUX side by side for training on the same dataset and observes better prompt alignment from FLUX dev.

“AI Look” and Adversarial Approaches

  • Some users still perceive an “AI look” compared to competing models (e.g., Wan 2.2), citing comparisons showing waxy or synthetic qualities.
  • A researcher reports experimenting with a classifier to distinguish AI vs non‑AI images and using it as a reward signal; they found direct finetuning on high‑quality photorealistic images more reliable.
  • They emphasize the difficulty of balancing “not AI-looking” with diversity; over‑optimization risks homogeneous style (like a fixed color cast or always‑glossy textures).

Ethical and Legal Concerns about Training Data

  • One commenter asks how the team ensured consent for training images.
  • The only direct response is a comparison to how human artists learn from permitted sources; no detailed dataset sourcing or consent mechanism is explained in this thread.
  • This leads to a heated sub‑thread debating whether training on massive scraped datasets is morally/legally comparable to human learning from life observation, with strong disagreement about whether scale and intentional ingestion of artworks are materially different.

Miscellaneous Feedback

  • HN moderators explain that canonical URL tags caused a misdirected submission; this is fixed and discussed as a feature for deduplication.
  • Several remarks about the Krea website’s hidden scrollbars and aesthetic‑driven UI choices; some find it visually pleasing, others see it as a usability regression.
  • Some users criticize the non‑commercial nature bluntly (“what’s the point”), while others defend releasing restricted models “for the love of the game” rather than pure profit.