Open-weight promise seems nice, but 1) I've seen people commenting that these hopes amounted to nothing for some previous releases (no idea which promises were made though); and 2) if the backbone is released as Dev, what will be missing? I can't easily tell from the post.
dev variants are usually cfg distilled which means that directly finetuning isn’t as effective. In the past, for the flux2 klein models,they released base versions that are not distilled. So it will probably be a while before you can fully take advantage of the open weights.
Could be handicapped version with more limited functionalities. Noentheless, open-weight is open-weight, I just hope the quality is good enough to be sota.
I run a fairly high-traffic site for generative image models focusing on complex prompt adherence. Flux.2 doesn’t score anywhere near SOTA proprietary models.
Klein 9b is decent for image-to-image, but when used for pure generative purposes brings back SDXL levels of body horror (have some Gattica pianists).
If you can get past the annoying JSON structuring, Ideogram 4 is probably the best option in the open‑weights world right now for text2image purposes, and even scored higher than the original Nano-Banana.
For ref: Flux.2 scored 5, Ideogram4 scored 8, and gpt-image-2 scored 12 out of 15.
Comparison of Flux.2 [dev], Ideogram4, NB Pro, and gpt-image-2.
I suppose "close" could be interpreted subjectively.
I use flux2.dev on my 5090 with a prompt upsampler (that I host on my 3080ti, it's been so long since I looked at it, its either some qwen or Mistral model). I use the upsampler to produce json structure based on this prompting guide: https://docs.bfl.ml/guides/prompting_guide_flux2
For being able to run on my 5090, it produces incredibly consistent and stable results that work for my use case so well, I find myself reaching for it over proprietary models.
I'm always interested to see objective comparisons though. It's clear from yours that flux lags. But the fact that I can use it locally over closed source sota models is very compelling (to me).
Ideogram4 is great! Just make sure that you either use some kind of preprocessor to convert your natural language prompt to the strict structured JSON format otherwise the results can suffer.
I personally use Qwen3 8b LLM for this purpose, but I think that the KJ prompt builder node handles this out of the box in ComfyUI.
> No nudity, lewdness, or sexually suggestive imagery. If it wouldn’t be appropriate for a workplace or younger audience, don’t post it here. NSFW tags are not an exception, stay classy.
Emphasis on the second sentence; where do these people work?!
The term "world model" as it was once used in model-based RL can now apparently refer to anything as silly as linear regression. Then again, the RL folks probably borrowed the term from behavioral scientists before them. It's probably best to simply accept this :/
A similar thing happened to "object oriented" which has been misused by philosophers and visual artists alike.
I'd have way more sympathy for the world-model-term-misuse complaints if the ML world hadn't studiously ignored and then reinvented so many fields over the years.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.06485 is enough to make any half decent game dev sit around wondering what was going on, as well as the general "maybe we're wasting a lot of space with all these floats?" At least now LLMs can tell them what SoTA is in other fields before they try to rediscover it.
In the 1990s "Object-Oriented Ontology" was introduced by Graham Harman [1]. The name was borrowed from computing, but its meaning has little or nothing to do with Simula or Smalltalk.
The OOO/"Speculative Realism" crowd are loony charlatans who make the current post-modern neo marxist politburo who runs the humanities parts of academia look downright sane.
My response to unironic OOO believers is that we must wage war on objects:
It would be interesting to see some time-series sentiment analysis of HN. Subjectively it feels like there's much negativity on HN these days, I hope I'm wrong.
IMO it’s best to just stop worrying and embrace it as the end of days for the field.
These are the last good ol’ days you will have before it’s all over. Worrying about it won’t change the future. Just try to focus on all the good AI does.
> time-series sentiment analysis [...] much negativity on HN these days, I hope I'm wrong
Depending on the members, there certainly is. Put aside the "dismissers", those who have a habit or a hormonal reliance to cast a "meh". Those who objectively assess according to the input that the development of facts provide may bend their "apparent mood" accordingly. This may be more evident here because in brighter times we may be more inclined to post and submit about more idle intellectual beauty ("complications in ancient clocks"), and in darker times it makes sense that we are more focused on the problems.
Personally I'm just bored of AI releases. I kinda dread it because it'll hog the front page of HN for a couple of days and it's just the same comments every time: people showing what it generated, people signalling that they aren't luddites etc.
For me this is like announcing a slightly more efficient form of coal-powered steam engine. Great, but it's still running on coal. I'm excited about moving beyond coal to cleaner and more sustainable energy sources. Current "AI", based on machine learning, is just recycling existing human works: books, films, code, forum posts etc. But those works, like the coal, is going to run out. We've decided to stop making new things and just burn the coal that's already been deposited.
It's probably actually good, but after this stuff with Qwen-Image-3 and it's ability to things like render images that look like they were rendered with LaTeX or compose many things side by side or in depth, maybe it's perhaps not totally in the right direction to only focus on visual stuff.
I'm a person who is making extensive use of current-gen "smart" LLM for coding tasks and building automation tools, doing some of the drudge work of gluing disparate open source things together into new projects. I'm fairly optimistic about that. Particularly when you have a good harness setup and you know enough about the subject matter to understand when a model has gone into some dead-end of reasoning or has built something that's not quite right.
At the same time, I can see social media is being flooded with absolutely horrid AI slop images and video. I'm much more pessimistic about the practical beneficial real world use of totally artificial image and video generators. It seems the uses that these things are put to when they get into the hands of millions of people are detrimental to society and not a benefit.
Yeah, really, masses are fine. I mean gross and boring mostly, but fine. Problem is when entrepreneurs get their hands on such tech, because they invariably put it to use for scamming and cheating people (read: marketing). It's the business people who are flooding social media with AI slop, for example.
Yea but that’s a fad - people are already fed up with the obvious slop. I don’t think it’s something we will see a lot in ~1-2 years.
Marketers will continue to hop on the next big trend just like they always did and all the current slop will become a different flavour slop.
Given that Martin Scorsese is now an "advisor", I suspect BFL will continue to position itself as the research lab for filmmakers. This video model, if comparable to Seedance 2.0 won't really make sense as a slop generator, as it's too expensive for that, but it would be part of a projects VFX pipeline.
Heh. On the other hand, we are seeing so much negativity around "AI", while we have access to something as close as possible to the "universal communicator" from trek. There are now several CotS things you can buy that basically serve this purpose. You can walk into a mall, buy one, and travel to the most remote place on Earth, speak in your own language, and almost anyone else can speak in their own language, and through technomagic the two of you can communicate. And yet there's so much pessimism...
Yup. People still don't believe when I say that we've cracked universal translation with LLMs. That's despite the proof being in their hands; anyone with any SOTA multimodal LLM app (read: Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini) with "advanced voice" / "live mode" can test it on the spot: just launch it and tell it will hear multiple languages and its task is to translate what it hears in one language to the other, and vice versa.
It's possible it's because some people care about the consequences of what we're doing as a society beyond the mindless satiation of curiosity. Nothing wrong with curiosity in my books by the way, but I do think isolating it the way we've done in the technical fields is a dangerous and irresponsible attitude.
As I understand it HN is a community for hackers to discuss interesting and curious topics.
Pessimistic opinions on the labor market, views about society and politics that border on the dystopian, as well as exaggerated concerns about datacenter environmental impacts, all seem like a poor fit for this website.
It would be a very uninformed world view and naive to say that the people who build and implement cutting-edge technology shouldn't be thinking about its societal implications and dangers. Or even considering more basic things like making sure it doesn't hurt anyone. Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you always should do a thing.
Anyone ever taken a CS course that includes extensive discussion of the Therac-25?
My issue with comments around the impact of AI is that often they are just not interesting.
What substance is there beyond "I don't like it, and I think it is a negative for society", typically delivered with what I perceive as a self-righteous attitude?
> My issue with comments around the impact of AI is that often they are just not interesting.
To quote the movie, that’s just your opinion, man. To me, the impact of technology on society is 100X as interesting and important than the technology itself. Tech does not exist in a vacuum. And we don’t invent it for its own sake. The major point of AI (maybe the only point of it) is what humans will do to each other with it. And like it or not, not all of those things are positive.
My criticism is specifically with the use of text-to-image and text-to-video generators that will create fully artificial video and image content. I've seen the uses that these tools are being put to in 2025/2026 for electoral manipulation, social issue manipulation and it leaves me with a very distasteful impression.
You will not see me leaving comments such as this, for example, on the release of a "strong in coding tasks" tool like GLM5.2.
I actively go out of my way to avoid patronizing businesses that advertise with AI slop generated images now, AI slop restaurant menus, and so forth.
Whether you want to interpret a desire for authenticity as some sort of self-righteous attitude is up to you. There's a lot of people that share my opinion, and a lot of them that don't. There is also clearly a lot of money behind pushing AI slop images everywhere. Facebook and the various 'pages' and 'groups' that are near 90% AI slop content are a fine example of that. I'm sure a great many advertising impressions and click-throughs have been served, much revenue has been earned. Great success.
That must be the poster child of the most boring and meaningless accusation thrown around new technologies (after the data center water scare, which was just plain bogus). We've heard this non stop since Cambridge Analytica nothingburger. It's all noise distracting from the one meaningful aspect of it: marketing to people is electoral manipulation, and since that's unquestionably allowed, the horses have left the barn long time ago, and futzing over the AI barn door control makes no sense at this point.
If anything, the problem that this is effective in the first place is the one to address - this translates to people still believing anything politicians say, despite decades of continued proof all the campaign promises are just plain bullshit, and stated beliefs are situational and not principled.
I'm not just talking about within the context of Cambridge Analytica / USA specific things.
For a more immediate example, look at Russian weaponization of social media in Mali for a pro-russia, anti-everyone-else narrative. Often deployed against a population that has a much greater level of credulity of anything they see on social media, and lack of inoculation against it by multiple years of seeing artificially generates nonsense.
I reserve my opinions on microsoft fuckery for more practical and immediate concerns like the recent LG monitors and device drivers auto-installing adware.
You must expand the view to: members here form a community of people with aggregage special skills (which the "intellectual curiosity" part itself suggests) and are operators in a real world, which we assess and discuss.
There are urgent matters, important matters, and nice matters - all relevant to us.
It is precisely those people who have abdicated such concerns who most need the discussion. You can not compartmentalize reality, even if you can compartmentalize your own mind. These discussions lead one closer to a relationship with reality as-it-is than as your mind would like it to be.
Is anyone feeding models touch data? It seems the main thing we want the robots to do is touch things, but we are just feeding them audio/video/images. The model has to learn how to touch things despite never having touched anything before. Perhaps that's why they all look so hesitant when they touch things?
Flux 2 Dev Klein has practically been the best you could use on most commercial hardware so I really hope Flux 3 has a comparable updated open-weights model to it. if not it'd be a great loss to most hobbyists.
A very beautiful place on earth: one friend who lives there enjoys road biking in the surrounding mountains. Another friend does cross-country skiing in his lunch break (in winter times).
I can totally see that. I imagine it's great for hiking and food. But if/when this company has an issue you'll have to move again or start working at the local Sparkasse or something.
I live nearby, its an amazing area, one of the sunniest in Germany with perfect landscape. Not sure about the talent pool though but there is a university.
You are completely ignorant. This is one of the best places to live and work on earth. Nonetheless, they also have positions in San Francisco for what is worth.
I am very excited for this. 2.3 was excellent and I've seen clips from people who got early access along with reading their reflections on it and I think this will be the new SOTA for home use.
> It jointly learns from images, videos, and audio within a unified architecture, because what it needs to learn is not any one of these elements in isolation.
I'm confused, videos contain images and audio ...?
That's most likely a disagreement on terms. In the media world, video is only the moving images, not audio. This is separate from images, that are meant to be still images.
Video contains images (frames), but not every image would reasonably be found in the frames of a video, or interpreted spatially. In the space of world model synthesis, consider blueprints, relationship diagrams, pages of instructions, sheet music, or a boarding pass.
It's more a comment about the feature detection I think; all image, video and audio input contribute to the same weights/activations that can produce image, video and audio output.
Amazing. This will be fundamental for the future for robots to distinguish the sound of the poors getting close to Besos/Musk's/Zuckerberg bunkers and quickly adapt to any new kind of attack by the masses, robots will quickly learn to adapt to the behavior of the attackers, quickly infer where they are grouped, their numbers and so for.
Of course there will be feuds from robots of different family groups but they will be minimal as it quickly becomes symmetrical robot conflict with high casualties as they learn too fast from each other, it's likely those will be avoided, it will be after all much easier to confront humans for any given resources.
Truly a pinnacle for technology, albeit perhaps not for mankind.
I hope flux will include a 3D generation model. right now the open-weights version of 3D is failing behind closed source by a big margin. Hopefully the improved spatial ability helps with robotics too
i don't get why they are investing money on image/video gen. All generations i have see looked blurry, lacking in fine details and missing the artistic touch (lacks meaning? lifeless?)
Open-weight plans are near the bottom (Launch section):
- Video and audio generation and editing through APIs and private weight access. (“FLUX 3 Video”)
- Action prediction through selected research and commercial partners, beginning with mimic robotics (“FLUX-mimic and FLUX 3 Action”)
- Image synthesis and editing through APIs and private weight access. (“FLUX 3 Image”)
- Open-weight access to a multimodal backbone, for content creation (video, audio and image) and action prediction. (“FLUX 3 Dev”)
I have a feeling open-weight models ought to be outperforming proprietary ones by now, but that still hasn’t happened. So far, Nano Banana and GPT-2 Image seem to be the best in class, and Flux still isn’t crossing that quality bar.
Well, unified multimodal intelligence is the only way we will get to The Terminator, which seems to be the goal now of Silicon Valley and every Nation State with a military budget, so have at.
Well, probably not, but I am not engaging in socialization. I am using it to help me decide among competing statistical modeling approaches, or other aspects of my research, including coding, neuroimaging pipelines, and an assortment of other thorny issues that come with longitudinal/developmental neuroscience.
Sorry because pointing this is a bit tired by now, but reading already the first two paragraph thete is this unmistakable stench of LLM slop writing. Immediately disengaged.
"Horseless slop trained on centuries of coachmakers' and blacksmiths' work. It'll never replace a real horse."
- Hacker News commenter in 1889 criticizing the automobile
The fact that people keep developing this technology shows that the true problem is not that machines are likely to become intelligent, but that people have already become machines - unthinking and without any care to the future whatsoever.
imagine spending nine figures training a model to learn that the sound has to match the impact. my 8-month-old figured that out by dropping a spoon on the floor twice.
Same person that was mocking the hands in image generation in 2023, is the same person that was saying 'hands are fixed but it can't generate "the red dog jumps over the jump rope held by the blue pelican while juggling 5 balls"' in 2024, is the same person that posted this.
I hope the open-weight versions will be SOTA.
> Over the next few weeks and months, we will make the following capabilities available
> Open-weight access to a multimodal backbone, for content creation (video, audio and image) and action prediction. (“FLUX 3 Dev”)
> We will also release more technical details on the underlying approach.
Open-weight promise seems nice, but 1) I've seen people commenting that these hopes amounted to nothing for some previous releases (no idea which promises were made though); and 2) if the backbone is released as Dev, what will be missing? I can't easily tell from the post.
dev variants are usually cfg distilled which means that directly finetuning isn’t as effective. In the past, for the flux2 klein models,they released base versions that are not distilled. So it will probably be a while before you can fully take advantage of the open weights.
Could be handicapped version with more limited functionalities. Noentheless, open-weight is open-weight, I just hope the quality is good enough to be sota.
Most of the disappointment around the previous open‑weight BFL release (at least for Flux.2 [dev]) came down to two main issues:
• It initially required significantly more VRAM and was much slower than alternatives released around the same time (like Z‑Image Turbo).
• The license felt overly restrictive.
Flux2.dev and even klein 9b are extremely close to sota. People who are saying otherwise probably haven't used them very much.
I run a fairly high-traffic site for generative image models focusing on complex prompt adherence. Flux.2 doesn’t score anywhere near SOTA proprietary models.
Klein 9b is decent for image-to-image, but when used for pure generative purposes brings back SDXL levels of body horror (have some Gattica pianists).
If you can get past the annoying JSON structuring, Ideogram 4 is probably the best option in the open‑weights world right now for text2image purposes, and even scored higher than the original Nano-Banana.
For ref: Flux.2 scored 5, Ideogram4 scored 8, and gpt-image-2 scored 12 out of 15.
Comparison of Flux.2 [dev], Ideogram4, NB Pro, and gpt-image-2.
https://genai-showdown.specr.net/?models=nbp,f2d,g2,id4
I suppose "close" could be interpreted subjectively.
I use flux2.dev on my 5090 with a prompt upsampler (that I host on my 3080ti, it's been so long since I looked at it, its either some qwen or Mistral model). I use the upsampler to produce json structure based on this prompting guide: https://docs.bfl.ml/guides/prompting_guide_flux2
For being able to run on my 5090, it produces incredibly consistent and stable results that work for my use case so well, I find myself reaching for it over proprietary models.
I'm always interested to see objective comparisons though. It's clear from yours that flux lags. But the fact that I can use it locally over closed source sota models is very compelling (to me).
You've convinced me to checkout ideogram4 though!
Ideogram4 is great! Just make sure that you either use some kind of preprocessor to convert your natural language prompt to the strict structured JSON format otherwise the results can suffer.
I personally use Qwen3 8b LLM for this purpose, but I think that the KJ prompt builder node handles this out of the box in ComfyUI.
https://github.com/kijai/ComfyUI-KJNodes
I run some of the 2.3 models locally so I'm not sure where you saw that they didn't follow their words?
It is not that they don't release open weights, but some users report that they are significantly inferior to the closed versions.
- Showed close to zero examples of people.
- Frivolous use of the term World Model.
- Claims 20 seconds of video, shows only jumpcuts.
Coming soon!
Many video examples on /r/stablediffusion
None within 24 hours of the announcement that show realistic human faces for than 3 seconds.
And they are stunning
Funny how rule #3 is
> No nudity, lewdness, or sexually suggestive imagery. If it wouldn’t be appropriate for a workplace or younger audience, don’t post it here. NSFW tags are not an exception, stay classy.
Emphasis on the second sentence; where do these people work?!
Reddit is open for minors and parents browse Reddit on their leisure time.
Otherwise a Gen Ai has to check this subreddit
> Frivolous use of the term World Model
The term "world model" as it was once used in model-based RL can now apparently refer to anything as silly as linear regression. Then again, the RL folks probably borrowed the term from behavioral scientists before them. It's probably best to simply accept this :/
A similar thing happened to "object oriented" which has been misused by philosophers and visual artists alike.
I'd have way more sympathy for the world-model-term-misuse complaints if the ML world hadn't studiously ignored and then reinvented so many fields over the years.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.06485 is enough to make any half decent game dev sit around wondering what was going on, as well as the general "maybe we're wasting a lot of space with all these floats?" At least now LLMs can tell them what SoTA is in other fields before they try to rediscover it.
> probably borrowed the term from behavioral scientists
It's from epistemology. It is not there to refer to the subjective but to the objective.
> A similar thing happened to "object oriented" which has been misused by philosophers and visual artists alike
For instance?
In the 1990s "Object-Oriented Ontology" was introduced by Graham Harman [1]. The name was borrowed from computing, but its meaning has little or nothing to do with Simula or Smalltalk.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Harman
This is very interesting especially in the terms of what I think some call a "rabbit hole",
but we could be curious on how and why you saw misuse.
The OOO/"Speculative Realism" crowd are loony charlatans who make the current post-modern neo marxist politburo who runs the humanities parts of academia look downright sane.
My response to unironic OOO believers is that we must wage war on objects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistentialism
I don’t see a problem. It appears to use a shared latent to learn inverse dynamics.
Yeah, very weird launch. I was like... where's the videos?
It's incredible how negative and dismissive the comments in here are while here I am thinking the model actually looks impressively capable.
But then again I heard the downers have always been the first to leave their dung comments here so let's see...
It would be interesting to see some time-series sentiment analysis of HN. Subjectively it feels like there's much negativity on HN these days, I hope I'm wrong.
You may like this old comment by dang who did this type of analysis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 (2020)
Bunch of software engineers are worried about their future employment prospects.
A lot of us spent substantial parts of our careers automating other folks out of jobs. But now that it's come for us, we're upset.
It's not that as much as the usual something new, complain about rapid change.
IMO it’s best to just stop worrying and embrace it as the end of days for the field.
These are the last good ol’ days you will have before it’s all over. Worrying about it won’t change the future. Just try to focus on all the good AI does.
s/software engineers/filmmakers/
filmmakers have the most to gain here, now anyone with a good idea for a story can just prompt out their own full length movie or tv show.
Before AI: 90% of everything was crap
After AI: 99% of everything is crap
... but there will be >10x more of it, so we'll ultimately end up with more good stuff.
Add in time zone of the commenter and potentially some really interesting data emerges.
Such as?
> time-series sentiment analysis [...] much negativity on HN these days, I hope I'm wrong
Depending on the members, there certainly is. Put aside the "dismissers", those who have a habit or a hormonal reliance to cast a "meh". Those who objectively assess according to the input that the development of facts provide may bend their "apparent mood" accordingly. This may be more evident here because in brighter times we may be more inclined to post and submit about more idle intellectual beauty ("complications in ancient clocks"), and in darker times it makes sense that we are more focused on the problems.
Personally I'm just bored of AI releases. I kinda dread it because it'll hog the front page of HN for a couple of days and it's just the same comments every time: people showing what it generated, people signalling that they aren't luddites etc.
For me this is like announcing a slightly more efficient form of coal-powered steam engine. Great, but it's still running on coal. I'm excited about moving beyond coal to cleaner and more sustainable energy sources. Current "AI", based on machine learning, is just recycling existing human works: books, films, code, forum posts etc. But those works, like the coal, is going to run out. We've decided to stop making new things and just burn the coal that's already been deposited.
It's probably actually good, but after this stuff with Qwen-Image-3 and it's ability to things like render images that look like they were rendered with LaTeX or compose many things side by side or in depth, maybe it's perhaps not totally in the right direction to only focus on visual stuff.
I'm a person who is making extensive use of current-gen "smart" LLM for coding tasks and building automation tools, doing some of the drudge work of gluing disparate open source things together into new projects. I'm fairly optimistic about that. Particularly when you have a good harness setup and you know enough about the subject matter to understand when a model has gone into some dead-end of reasoning or has built something that's not quite right.
At the same time, I can see social media is being flooded with absolutely horrid AI slop images and video. I'm much more pessimistic about the practical beneficial real world use of totally artificial image and video generators. It seems the uses that these things are put to when they get into the hands of millions of people are detrimental to society and not a benefit.
Only the enlightened tech elite should have access to such sophisticated technology - we can’t expect the uneducated masses to not misuse them
/s
Yeah, really, masses are fine. I mean gross and boring mostly, but fine. Problem is when entrepreneurs get their hands on such tech, because they invariably put it to use for scamming and cheating people (read: marketing). It's the business people who are flooding social media with AI slop, for example.
Yea but that’s a fad - people are already fed up with the obvious slop. I don’t think it’s something we will see a lot in ~1-2 years. Marketers will continue to hop on the next big trend just like they always did and all the current slop will become a different flavour slop.
Given that Martin Scorsese is now an "advisor", I suspect BFL will continue to position itself as the research lab for filmmakers. This video model, if comparable to Seedance 2.0 won't really make sense as a slop generator, as it's too expensive for that, but it would be part of a projects VFX pipeline.
none of this is exciting compared to holodeck in star trek
> in star trek
Heh. On the other hand, we are seeing so much negativity around "AI", while we have access to something as close as possible to the "universal communicator" from trek. There are now several CotS things you can buy that basically serve this purpose. You can walk into a mall, buy one, and travel to the most remote place on Earth, speak in your own language, and almost anyone else can speak in their own language, and through technomagic the two of you can communicate. And yet there's so much pessimism...
Yup. People still don't believe when I say that we've cracked universal translation with LLMs. That's despite the proof being in their hands; anyone with any SOTA multimodal LLM app (read: Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini) with "advanced voice" / "live mode" can test it on the spot: just launch it and tell it will hear multiple languages and its task is to translate what it hears in one language to the other, and vice versa.
Advertisers love these sorts of reactions.
I see nothing here but them TELLING us how great it is. Not showing us.
> Not showing us
Have you watched the 46s video full screen on a monitor and not marvelled at the incredible 4K detail of the FPV motorcycle racing clip?
It's possible it's because some people care about the consequences of what we're doing as a society beyond the mindless satiation of curiosity. Nothing wrong with curiosity in my books by the way, but I do think isolating it the way we've done in the technical fields is a dangerous and irresponsible attitude.
As I understand it HN is a community for hackers to discuss interesting and curious topics.
Pessimistic opinions on the labor market, views about society and politics that border on the dystopian, as well as exaggerated concerns about datacenter environmental impacts, all seem like a poor fit for this website.
It would be a very uninformed world view and naive to say that the people who build and implement cutting-edge technology shouldn't be thinking about its societal implications and dangers. Or even considering more basic things like making sure it doesn't hurt anyone. Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you always should do a thing.
Anyone ever taken a CS course that includes extensive discussion of the Therac-25?
My issue with comments around the impact of AI is that often they are just not interesting.
What substance is there beyond "I don't like it, and I think it is a negative for society", typically delivered with what I perceive as a self-righteous attitude?
> My issue with comments around the impact of AI is that often they are just not interesting.
To quote the movie, that’s just your opinion, man. To me, the impact of technology on society is 100X as interesting and important than the technology itself. Tech does not exist in a vacuum. And we don’t invent it for its own sake. The major point of AI (maybe the only point of it) is what humans will do to each other with it. And like it or not, not all of those things are positive.
That not all of the tech's applications are positive seems obvious, and hardly makes for interesting discussion.
Is there something in particular that you think would be interesting to discuss here?
My criticism is specifically with the use of text-to-image and text-to-video generators that will create fully artificial video and image content. I've seen the uses that these tools are being put to in 2025/2026 for electoral manipulation, social issue manipulation and it leaves me with a very distasteful impression.
You will not see me leaving comments such as this, for example, on the release of a "strong in coding tasks" tool like GLM5.2.
I actively go out of my way to avoid patronizing businesses that advertise with AI slop generated images now, AI slop restaurant menus, and so forth.
Whether you want to interpret a desire for authenticity as some sort of self-righteous attitude is up to you. There's a lot of people that share my opinion, and a lot of them that don't. There is also clearly a lot of money behind pushing AI slop images everywhere. Facebook and the various 'pages' and 'groups' that are near 90% AI slop content are a fine example of that. I'm sure a great many advertising impressions and click-throughs have been served, much revenue has been earned. Great success.
> electoral manipulation
That must be the poster child of the most boring and meaningless accusation thrown around new technologies (after the data center water scare, which was just plain bogus). We've heard this non stop since Cambridge Analytica nothingburger. It's all noise distracting from the one meaningful aspect of it: marketing to people is electoral manipulation, and since that's unquestionably allowed, the horses have left the barn long time ago, and futzing over the AI barn door control makes no sense at this point.
If anything, the problem that this is effective in the first place is the one to address - this translates to people still believing anything politicians say, despite decades of continued proof all the campaign promises are just plain bullshit, and stated beliefs are situational and not principled.
I'm not just talking about within the context of Cambridge Analytica / USA specific things.
For a more immediate example, look at Russian weaponization of social media in Mali for a pro-russia, anti-everyone-else narrative. Often deployed against a population that has a much greater level of credulity of anything they see on social media, and lack of inoculation against it by multiple years of seeing artificially generates nonsense.
I bet you even Windows built-in Pinball game hurt somebody and had social implications.
I reserve my opinions on microsoft fuckery for more practical and immediate concerns like the recent LG monitors and device drivers auto-installing adware.
The point is inclusion criteria are too broad
You must expand the view to: members here form a community of people with aggregage special skills (which the "intellectual curiosity" part itself suggests) and are operators in a real world, which we assess and discuss.
There are urgent matters, important matters, and nice matters - all relevant to us.
It is precisely those people who have abdicated such concerns who most need the discussion. You can not compartmentalize reality, even if you can compartmentalize your own mind. These discussions lead one closer to a relationship with reality as-it-is than as your mind would like it to be.
There are less things to talk about on HN today than ever before!
I disagree.
We live in a time where artificial intelligence begins to rival humans in some areas.
We can now really automate things.
How interesting is that? There is so much to talk about.
Is anyone feeding models touch data? It seems the main thing we want the robots to do is touch things, but we are just feeding them audio/video/images. The model has to learn how to touch things despite never having touched anything before. Perhaps that's why they all look so hesitant when they touch things?
Its faster to just have them simulate touching things, they figure it out way faster that way
first AI thing coming from Europe that gives high hopes
Flux 2 Dev Klein has practically been the best you could use on most commercial hardware so I really hope Flux 3 has a comparable updated open-weights model to it. if not it'd be a great loss to most hobbyists.
These people are hiring in... Freiburg im Breisgau? Wonder how hiring is working out for them there.
A very beautiful place on earth: one friend who lives there enjoys road biking in the surrounding mountains. Another friend does cross-country skiing in his lunch break (in winter times).
I can totally see that. I imagine it's great for hiking and food. But if/when this company has an issue you'll have to move again or start working at the local Sparkasse or something.
I live nearby, its an amazing area, one of the sunniest in Germany with perfect landscape. Not sure about the talent pool though but there is a university.
Freiburg University is pretty well known isn't it?
Hiring in university towns is a pretty standard practice for startups outside SF.
there's a reason people call it Flyburg im Nicegau.
Why Fly?
Being "fly" is slang for being cool. It has been officially chosen as German youth word of the year in 2016 [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_word_of_the_year_(German...
Ok boomer. SCNR 2016 is a while ago. Flew by me
I think these days not being in the US is a plus for many potential hires.
You are completely ignorant. This is one of the best places to live and work on earth. Nonetheless, they also have positions in San Francisco for what is worth.
I'm sure it's a great place to live and work, but can you please edit out swipes from your comments here, as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)?
Your post would have been just fine without that first bit.
the bay is not the world.
I thought the clips were real footage until they were dancing in a flooded room.
I am very excited for this. 2.3 was excellent and I've seen clips from people who got early access along with reading their reflections on it and I think this will be the new SOTA for home use.
> a model must learn a representation of the world: […] and how events sound
I honestly hope they put an unrealistic amount of wilhelm scream into the learning process, just for fun.
"Actually, let me be careful placing the rubber sealing. If I do it too roughly, it screams."
Awesome -- glad they're going to release the open weight version! I've been waiting for an excuse to re jump into AI OS image gen!
> It jointly learns from images, videos, and audio within a unified architecture, because what it needs to learn is not any one of these elements in isolation.
I'm confused, videos contain images and audio ...?
That's most likely a disagreement on terms. In the media world, video is only the moving images, not audio. This is separate from images, that are meant to be still images.
Video contains images (frames), but not every image would reasonably be found in the frames of a video, or interpreted spatially. In the space of world model synthesis, consider blueprints, relationship diagrams, pages of instructions, sheet music, or a boarding pass.
It's more a comment about the feature detection I think; all image, video and audio input contribute to the same weights/activations that can produce image, video and audio output.
Amazing. This will be fundamental for the future for robots to distinguish the sound of the poors getting close to Besos/Musk's/Zuckerberg bunkers and quickly adapt to any new kind of attack by the masses, robots will quickly learn to adapt to the behavior of the attackers, quickly infer where they are grouped, their numbers and so for.
Of course there will be feuds from robots of different family groups but they will be minimal as it quickly becomes symmetrical robot conflict with high casualties as they learn too fast from each other, it's likely those will be avoided, it will be after all much easier to confront humans for any given resources.
Truly a pinnacle for technology, albeit perhaps not for mankind.
When they hide in their bunkers, who's to stop people from pouring concrete down the ventilation shafts?
Or aerosolized LSD...
I wonder if this also creates people with huge heads and short necks like Flux Klein does.
I hope flux will include a 3D generation model. right now the open-weights version of 3D is failing behind closed source by a big margin. Hopefully the improved spatial ability helps with robotics too
i don't get why they are investing money on image/video gen. All generations i have see looked blurry, lacking in fine details and missing the artistic touch (lacks meaning? lifeless?)
> why they are investing money
Maybe they presume that after a series of "good enough to some" they may be getting near the Real Thing?
now look at AI images/videos from 5 years ago.
Open-weight plans are near the bottom (Launch section):
I have a feeling open-weight models ought to be outperforming proprietary ones by now, but that still hasn’t happened. So far, Nano Banana and GPT-2 Image seem to be the best in class, and Flux still isn’t crossing that quality bar.
If you think about it why is language/image even separate from video?
Isn’t video + audio all you need?
video is just a group of images (GOP) if the gist is what you're after
Lots of words about multi-modal but then this:
> our mission to develop real-world visual intelligence
Visual is mono-modal, isn't it?
its doing video, audio, images and motion. I think that counts as multimodal.
Is this really the value-add comment you’re going with?
Says the one who posts this comment?
the grift that keeps on grifting. no examples longer than a second, non recent anyway... just more hype, and no substance.
Well, unified multimodal intelligence is the only way we will get to The Terminator, which seems to be the goal now of Silicon Valley and every Nation State with a military budget, so have at.
I wish you were being hyperbolic but I know better.
I don't even know anymore, to be honest. I talk to AIs more than I do with humans, these days...So who knows
That doesn’t sound healthy
Well, probably not, but I am not engaging in socialization. I am using it to help me decide among competing statistical modeling approaches, or other aspects of my research, including coding, neuroimaging pipelines, and an assortment of other thorny issues that come with longitudinal/developmental neuroscience.
Sorry because pointing this is a bit tired by now, but reading already the first two paragraph thete is this unmistakable stench of LLM slop writing. Immediately disengaged.
Nobody is forcing you to read it. If you lose some interesting information because you don't like how it sounds, that's your loss.
Thanks for the heads-up
It comes back as AI written when checked in Pangram, but I am skeptical.
It does not seem as grating as the slop I typically see in README.md files or generated docs.
Correct reaction
AI slop trained on copyrighted content.
"Horseless slop trained on centuries of coachmakers' and blacksmiths' work. It'll never replace a real horse." - Hacker News commenter in 1889 criticizing the automobile
This is close to the stupidest thing I've ever read. Congrats
How about CNC mill being slop trained on millions of hours of blacksmith and machinist experience?
The fact that people keep developing this technology shows that the true problem is not that machines are likely to become intelligent, but that people have already become machines - unthinking and without any care to the future whatsoever.
Show it, don't just say it. The argument would be?
imagine spending nine figures training a model to learn that the sound has to match the impact. my 8-month-old figured that out by dropping a spoon on the floor twice.
Same person that was mocking the hands in image generation in 2023, is the same person that was saying 'hands are fixed but it can't generate "the red dog jumps over the jump rope held by the blue pelican while juggling 5 balls"' in 2024, is the same person that posted this.
"One-shot learning" is still part of the discipline, actively studied (definitely in the past and surely in the present).