Flux

Overview Flux is the image model that photorealism people quietly switched to in 2024 and never went back from. Built by Black Forest Labs — a team founded by the same researchers who trained the original Stable Diffusion at Stability AI before leaving — Flux launched in August 2024 with three weight variants and a very specific pitch: open weight, benchmark beating, and unapologetically photographic. Two years later, in mid 2026, Flux is the reference model most working pros compare against when they say the words "AI photorealism." What sets Flux apart is not marketing polish — Black Forest Labs barely does marketing — but the pixel level quality of the output. Skin looks like skin. Hands have the right number of fingers most of the time. Product photography renders with plausible material response. Cinematic stills carry believable lighting and depth of field cues instead of the plastic sheen that gives most AI images away in a Twitter feed. On the standard prompt fidelity and aesthetic benchmarks the field cares about, Flux Pro 1.1 (the current flagship variant) trades top position with Midjourney v7 depending on the category, and beats it outright for anything realism adjacent. Flux the product is unusual. There is a hosted API at api.bfl.ai for developers who want a first party endpoint. There are open weights for Flux [dev] and Flux [schnell] anyone can download and run locally, plus a commercial Flux Pro tier available only via API and partner platforms. That combination — a top…