New FLEX AI Model!?

Key Takeaways

today we're taking a quick look at this Flex one alpha and you might notice that this is not flux this is f I'm also going to show you a couple of workflows that you can run with this just a simple version and then some comparisons and what this is is basically a fine tune of the flux Schnell model but it has similar architecture to flux Dev so why would you do this well basically the flux Chanel M has the Apache 2 license which basically lets you do whatever you want with it compared to flux Dev which is uh a lot more limited so using the flux Chanel as a base working on that and getting that up to well the hope is to get it up to the alux dev quality and a base for f tunes and well see if that's going to be the case now compared to the other models this is an 8B model the others are the flux Dev ones are 12b and they claim here fine tunable now still have debate going on you know if the others are fine tunable or not I'm not going to get into that debate but basically all you need to do is uh get this file here Flex Alpha safe tensors it's a doy 21 GB but it has the text encoders and the vae included so you only need this download that go into your models folder check points and drop it in there you can also drop it in diffusion models for example or unet but if you want to have uh the load checkpoints node which is the one that we're using here with the model and the clip and the ve all in one just put it in the checkpoints folder right I have done some testing here and I actually loaded the flux turbo Lura with this so that's commonly used for some of the D distill versions of flux Dev and I'm also running this now at eight steps I'm going to I run quick comparison here so this is not really an XY plot this just a simple workflow where we have a comparison so just using Oiler normal CFG 1.5 through the CFG guer here which uh also allows us to have negative prompts with this we then have eight steps 20 steps 20 steps which is eight steps turbo Laura 20 steps turbo Laura why would you do that and 20 steps no Laura well actually I found out that you can get some cool results with using the turbo at higher steps you get this kind of a textured look on some of your images now with all that said most of the closeup stuff is fairly plasticky and uh it was I didn't find a good way to get around that now this was released yesterday so I haven't had too much to test but if you get some great results or have some success yourself put your info in the comments for everyone to learn there's much to be improved here now with eight steps and the Turbo laora I mean except for the plasticky skin I would say the quality is is okay I mean it's eight step so it's a fairly quick generation I mean it still flux so it's not the fastest model right but if you compare it to like running the 20 steps with no Laura it's not too bad less than half of the steps and a similar looking generation again caveat with a plastic skin but having another example here with which is just one image this is eight step with a turalura just a cat and a hat and with these kinds of images you aren't really noticing the plasticky skin now if you like zoom in obviously you're going to see it's a little artifact here but as a base to start fine tuning from I think it's you know it's pretty cool if you do want the turbo laora you can get it from this link all the links are going to be in the description below I just downloaded this model here 694 megab you put it inside your models Lura and then you drop it right in there I renamed mine uh called flux turbo Laura you can do whatever you want basically it doesn't matter oh editing side here I forgot to show you some of the images that are available here so here's some samples let's zoom in here so these are some samples made by the Creator it's a hid and Miss but as a base for fine tunes well I'm sure there's something there right because the prompt understanding is good so uh I'm sure there is some potential here now again you just look at them at Phase value if you see this as a fully fine tune model and compare it to any other fine tunes well then yeah obviously the results aren't amazing but uh it's a step in the right direction and it has the Apache license so why is this interesting right the cool thing about this is like we talked about previously you can start using this for fine tunes so is the community going to Rally behind this I don't know we'll see it's a cool new release and some people have been complaining about the possibilities for Flex fine tunes with the other models I've see some cool work for D distilled versions getting to pretty cool results even in and you know with eight steps and the turble ORS and stuff like that but I think this has some cool potential you can actually you don't need any custom nodes to run this so I'm going to provide this workflow uh in the links below and this is basically all core comfy notes right so we just loading checkpoint loading Laura all this basic stuff that uh well is similar to what you would use in flux so think of your flux Dev and flux D distill Dev workflows take what is work there and test it with the flex Alpha model and I'm sure you're going to find some cool stuff right I did some quick testing bear in mind this is nothing fancy I just did an XY plot with four steps eight steps and different Samplers yes I know they're all in normal but again this just a quick test I'm using Oiler which I found was you know again apart from the plasticky skin and The Cliff Chin that you always get them from the flux Bas it's uh it's fairly decent I think there's some interesting potential with with the hin here now this has a lot of weird noise right but maybe we can use this weird noise let's say you have a k sampler that starts with this let's say you run it for like 70% of the generation then you end up with you swap to another K sampler with another sampler ends the generation while still retaining some of this noise would that help with the plasticky things maybe I don't know I'm not a scientist but if you know any cool tips let me know in the comments below I'm sure everyone is eager to learn apart from that most Samplers did not do much here at eight steps so it's very plasticky or very broken again all with normal but it's cool to see some comparisons at least now I do not have a comparison between this and flux Dev currently I did run a few here but I've removed them from the workflow and I would say that if you're running 20 step steps here right I mean flux Dev is probably better as a base than this but if you're comparing this to flux chel now that's a different story right so the point is can we get this basically flux chel up to flux Dev standards while also retaining lower step count that would be cool and I honestly if people start fine-tuning this I I think that's uh quite likely is a high possibility I don't know but if you want to start playing with this now there's a workflow in the description it links to my patreon but it's an it's a free link so it's not locked behind the pay wall but yeah some cool stuff coming from the community this was launched uh just just last night play with it see where you feel maybe do a viking in a hat oh and just remember if you change the CFG to one or lower uh that the negative prompt is not going to work great for you also going to break the image a bit uh this looks more like a Russian Uh Russian Viking dog in a hat oh good thing is actually can generate while I am recording which has been somewhat of an issue with flux Dev running um at maximum that a cute dog anyway test it out if you want if not well see you in the next one have a good one