alt Hacker NewsKrea 2: SOTA open-weights 12B image model
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Hello HN,
I am Diego Rodriguez, Co-founder & CTO at Krea.
We are releasing the weights and a _juicy_ technical report---at least given current industry standards. In it we describe data curation/captioning, model architecture, post-training, RL pipelines, prompt expansion, style references, and our infrastructure in great detail.
When it comes to theweights themselves, there's actually 2 releases:
* Krea 2 Turbo. This model is both guidance- and timestep- distilled for faster inference.
* Krea 2 RAW. This model is actually meant to be hackable/fine-tunable
One of the things we think the (open) LLM community does well is release models in different sizes and also at different stages of the training pipelines; we are releasing two checkpoints at both the mid-training and post-training stage. This is rare in the image & multimedia community, so we can't help it but to feel proud of this release.
We are on par with Nano Banana in terms of image quality as per Artificial Analysis text-to-image benchmarks (https://artificialanalysis.ai/image/leaderboard/text-to-imag...).
We also attached a permissive license for individuals and small businesses.
Useful links:
- Marketing page around the OSS release: https://www.krea.ai/krea-2-open-source
- Huggingface model: https://www.krea.ai/krea-2/huggingface
- GitHub repository: https://www.krea.ai/krea-2/github
- Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1udnm0a/we...
- Technical report: https://www.krea.ai/blog/krea-2-technical-report Thank you and I hope you enjoy this release---happy hacking!
Some of our team members will be answering questions since we are at the front page for now (thank you HN!).
Happy hacking!
Results are in! This is a really impressive showing especially given how fast the Turbo model at 8 steps. The only locally hostable model that managed to outperform it was Ideogram 4 which is significantly slower (think minutes vs seconds).
It did fall to the usual “model killers”: the nine-pointed star, Count Rugen, the overcrowded flat Earth. But overall, it really punched above its weight class, scoring the highest among locally hostable models and coming in just below Ideogram 4 passing 6 of the 15 tests.
Great job Krea team!
GenAI link to compare locally hostable models only:
https://genai-showdown.specr.net/?models=fd,hd,kd,qi,f2d,zt,...
Good to have more open weight models, and I really appreciate the in-depth write-up.
I also like the "keep the manifold wide" approach of trying to make a model capable of many styles as opposed to getting it "dialed in" for a dozen of style presets.
But it does feel very much like "fighting the past war" - now that advanced "image-to-image"/"agentic composition" models like Nano Banana 2 or Images 2.0 are out there in force.
I seriously doubt that the basic Qwen 3 VL in cross can get anywhere near that level of I2I. And robust I2I is very desirable - editing, adjustment, character consistency, the generalization of whatever you're doing with style transfer now (underexplained BTW).
Trying to hit that level of I2I is not by any means easy, but it's pretty clear to me that this is where the next frontier for image models lies. Feels like Ideogram might be building up to it, but I'm yet to see it anywhere else in open weight space.
While I appreciate that Krea made this model's weights available for download, it's not open source when the license (https://huggingface.co/krea/Krea-2-Raw/blob/main/LICENSE.pdf) has these terms:
> 2.3 Revenue Threshold for Commercial Use. Commercial Use under this Agreement of the Krea Model, Derivatives, or Outputs is permitted only if you (including all affiliated entities under common ownership or control) have total company-wide annual revenue of less than one million United States dollars ($1,000,000 USD), calculated on a trailing twelve-month basis and including all revenue from all sources. If you meet or exceed this threshold, you must obtain a separate enterprise license from Krea prior to any Commercial Use. If your revenue meets or exceeds this threshold at any time during your use of the Krea Model under this Agreement, you must immediately cease Commercial Use and contact Krea. Enterprise license inquiries may be directed to [email protected].
> 4.1 General Restrictions. You shall not, and shall not permit any third party to: (a) Use the Krea Model, any Derivative, or any Output in violation of applicable law, regulation, this Agreement, or the Acceptable Use Policy;
> 4.2 Content Filtering Requirement. You must implement reasonable and appropriate Content Filter measures to detect, prevent, and mitigate the generation or distribution of prohibited, harmful, or unlawful content through your deployment of the Krea Model or any Derivative. Such measures may include, but are not limited to: (a) open-source content classifiers, such as Falconsai/nsfw_image_detection, NudeNet, or CompVis safety checker; (b) commercial content moderation APIs, such as Hive Moderation or Microsoft Azure AI Content Safety; (c) manual human review processes; and/or (d) any combination of the foregoing or other technically appropriate measures.
> 4.4 Acceptable Use Policy Compliance. You must comply with the Acceptable Use Policy, which is incorporated herein by reference.
The acceptable use policy is on the website (https://www.krea.ai/krea-2-use-policy) and includes:
> You shall not use or allow others to use the Krea 2 Raw Model or Krea 2 Turbo Model, any Derivative, or any Output for any of the following purposes:
> (8) Circumventing or removing any safety measures, usage restrictions, content filters, content provenance, or watermarking mechanisms implemented by Krea or any deployer;
Turbo appears GGUF'd already: https://huggingface.co/Abiray/Krea-2-Turbo-GGUF
Interesting item on the careers page btw. For anyone that knows what older school Mellanox was about, it might be your kind of thing: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/krea/ebe94024-eef6-4306-a019-10072a... :D
It's a good model sadly the use of the qwen vae is a bit of a downer.
Looking forward to playing with Krea 2, I use Z-Image Turbo daily -- it has replaced my stock photo subscriptions, for realism and illustrations.
May I ask how much did the training cost you?
What are people using for self hosting these? I tried ollama with open-webui and it didn't support image generation at all.
The example images look great. Always good to have more diverse OSS models.
Did anyone generate a pelican riding a bicycle?
I tried two of the Krea 2 models in LM Studio, but loading the downloaded models errored out. (Maybe I'm doing it wrong, since it's an image model.)
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47800562
Hi HN, we're releasing weights for our latest text to image model and publishing this writeup on how we trained it in quite a bit of depth.
I hope there is something in the report for everyone, we included a fair bit on the actual training and data infrastructure usually not written about much, that I think will be interesting to people here. There's more that didn't fit, happy to answer questions!