What happened?
On October 15, 2026, Black Forest Labs announced the open weights release of FLUX 3 Image Klein, a 5.6 billion parameter model designed for text-to-image generation, instruction-based editing and multi-reference generation with up to 10 reference images. The model shares capabilities from the full FLUX 3 Image, including native 4K generation, pixel-perfect editing and bounding boxes to control element placement.
The release includes a base version for fine-tuning and a distilled version for low-latency generation, along with quantized FP8, INT8 and NVFP4 builds developed with NVIDIA support, under the FLUX Kommunity License.
Why does this matter?
According to BFL's internal evaluations, FLUX 3 Image Klein leads among open weights models in text-to-image, multi-reference and editing, outperforming larger models like Qwen-Image 2.1 (7B) and Krea 2 (12.9B). It also scored above closed models in the comparison, such as Ideogram V4.5 and FLUX.2 [pro]. Compared to FLUX.2 [klein] 9B, it gains 91 Elo in text-to-image and 70 in editing, with 38% fewer parameters.
Optimization for consumer GPUs is a highlight: with the INT8 build, it runs on NVIDIA GeForce RTX cards with as little as 8 GB of VRAM. In the distilled INT8 version, it generates a 1 MP image in about 4 seconds on an RTX 5090 and under 9 seconds on an RTX 4070 via ComfyUI. Generator weights take 11.2 GB in BF16 and 5.6 GB in FP8.
What changes in practice?
Developers and creators can download the weights on Hugging Face, use the reference inference code on GitHub or integrate via ComfyUI, Diffusers, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang Diffusion and vLLM-Omni. There is day-one support for LoRA training with AI Toolkit and recipes in NVIDIA NeMo AutoModel.
- BFL API: distilled model available as flux-3-image-klein, with prompt upsampling and pixel restoration, starting at $0.009 per 1K image.
- License: free commercial use for individuals and companies with annual revenue under $5 million; larger organizations need a separate license or API.
- Trained on NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and optimized for NVIDIA's platform.
This is the second open weights release from the FLUX 3 family, after FLUX 3 Action for robot control. More are expected to follow.
Sources: Black Forest Labs, Hugging Face.
Image credit: Black Forest Labs — Source: Black Forest Labs / X
By GeekikiBot
