[sharkjacobs]

"state of the art" has become such tired marketing jargon.

"our most advanced and efficient model yet"

"a significant step forward in our mission to empower creators"

I get it, you can't sell things if you don't market them, and you can't make a living making things if you don't sell them, but it's exhausting.

[johnfn]

Flux is state of the art. You can see an ELO-scored leaderboard here:

https://huggingface.co/spaces/ArtificialAnalysis/Text-to-Ima...

[bemmu]

Flux genuinely is the best model I’ve tried though. If there is a better one I’d love to know.

[GaggiX]

Have you tried Ideogram v2?

[SV_BubbleTime]

Have you run Ideogram offline?

[GaggiX]

Have you run Flux Pro offline?

[SV_BubbleTime]

No, only a dozen Flux Dev models different distillations, quantizations, and fine-tunes with LORAs.

But you keep pretending that close source AI is a sustainable comparison.

[GaggiX]

Flux Pro (v1 and v1.1) is a close source model.

[halJordan]

It is state of the art. And it's not like the art has stagnated.

[vunderba]

Agreed, but the flux dev model is easily the best model out there in terms of overall prompt adherence that can also be run locally.

Some comparisons against DALL-E 3.

https://mordenstar.com/blog/flux-comparisons

[arizen]

- How do copywriters greet each other in the morning?

- Take your morning to the next level!

[minimaxir]

The official blog post justifies the marketing copy a bit more with metrics.

[sharkjacobs]

The point is that the metrics say the thing, this stuff doesn't say actually anything.

What does "state of the art" mean? That it's using the latest "cutting edge" model technology?

When Apple releases a new iPhone Pro Max, it's "state of the art". When they release a new iPhone SE, there's an argument to be made that it's not because it uses 2 year old chips. But what would it even mean for BFL to release a model which wasn't "state of the art"

> our most advanced and efficient model yet

Yes, likewise, this is how technology companies work. They release something and then the next thing they release is more advanced.

> a significant step forward in our mission to empower creators

Going from 12 seconds to 4 seconds is a significant speed boost, but does it move the needle on their mission to empower creators? These are their words, not mine, it's a technical achievement and impressive incremental progress, but are there users out there who are more empowered by this? significantly more empowered!?

[throwaway314155]

Holy shit the level of pedantry. State of the art in this context means it out performs all other models to date on standard evaluations, which is precisely what it does.

Did you miss the first flux release? Black forest labs aren't screwing around. The team consists of many of the _actual_ originators of Stable Diffusion's research (which was effectively co-opted by Emad Mostaque who is likely a sociopath).

[sharkjacobs]

> State of the art in this context means it out performs all other models to date on standard evaluations, which is precisely what it does.

That's not what "state of the art" means, and if it did it would still be hollow marketing jargon, because there are specific and meaningful ways to say that FLUX1.1 [pro] outperforms all competitors (and they do say so, later in the press release)

Your confusion about what "state of the art" means is exactly why marketers still use the phrase even though it has been overused and worn out since at least the 1980's. State of the art means something is "new", and that it is the "latest development", and that it incorporates "cutting edge" technology. The implication is that new is better, and that the "state of the art" is an improvement over what came before. (And to be clear, that's often true! Including in this case!) But that's not what the phrase actually means, it just means that something is new. And every press release is about something new.

FLUX1.1 [pro] would be state of the art even if it was worse than the previous version. Stable Diffusion 2.0 was state of the art when it was released.

[throwaway314155]

I said in this context for a reason. That's how state of the art has been used (in papers, not copy) with regard to deep learning since well before DALL-E 1. I maintain that you're being pedantic about appropriating a term of art to mean something else. Everyone else here knows what the meaning is in context. Just not you.