Black Forest Labs Unveils FLUX 3 AI: Ditches Stills for Video—And Robotic Arms – Decrypt

Black Forest Labs launched FLUX 3 on Thursday, and for the primary time, the corporate’s flagship mannequin generates video as an alternative of simply nonetheless pictures. The German AI lab, recognized for the FLUX line of picture turbines, educated the brand new system on pictures, video, and audio without delay, inside one shared system.

That’s what is named multimodality: one mannequin studying a number of kinds of data collectively as an alternative of separate instruments bolted facet by facet.

The video facet is the headline function. FLUX 3 produces clips as much as 20 seconds lengthy, with audio generated alongside the image and synced to what’s occurring on display—dialogue, sound results, ambient noise. In early evaluations, human reviewers most popular FLUX 3’s output over Runway Gen-4.5 in 77% of head-to-head comparisons and over Luma Ray 3.2 in 93%. It appears to be barely higher than Gemini Omni and Seedance, beating these fashions in 52% of the evaluations.

After all, that’s a choice check, not a hard and fast scoring rubric: evaluators merely watch two clips and decide the one that appears and sounds extra convincing, and BFL counts how usually FLUX 3 wins.

Apart from that, the mannequin appears to be very competent on nonetheless pictures too, following its legacy. BFL shared a number of pictures, and FLUX 3 appears to be very versatile and able to producing a broad number of types past photorealism.

BFL frames this as greater than a content material device. “A mannequin that solely learns pictures can solely generate pictures,” mentioned co-founder and CEO Robin Rombach. The corporate’s wager is that studying to foretell video additionally means studying the physics beneath it—weight, contact, timing—which is strictly what a machine wants to maneuver by way of the bodily world.

That wager has a reputation: FLUX-mimic. Constructed with Zurich-based mimic robotics, it takes FLUX 3’s video-prediction engine and provides a light-weight “decoder”—a small add-on part that interprets the mannequin’s inside sense of how issues transfer into precise robotic motions. Automobile maker Audi is already testing it on duties like becoming versatile door seals, work that typical automation has struggled to deal with.

“Audi represents the sort of manufacturing companion we constructed FLUX-mimic for,” mentioned mimic co-founder Stephan-Daniel Gravert. Audi’s Christoph Schneider mentioned the robots now “resolve complicated soft-body manipulation work” that older machines couldn’t contact. BFL says the complete system reacts in about 101 milliseconds, within the neighborhood of human visible reflexes.

FLUX’s rise didn’t occur in a vacuum. Based in August 2024 by veteran researchers who’d helped construct the unique Secure Diffusion fashions at Stability AI, Black Forest Labs launched Flux fashions that beat MidJourney and outclassed Stability’s personal underwhelming Secure Diffusion 3.

The open-source Flux Dev and Schnell fashions grabbed the “finest open supply picture generator” title that AI artists had anticipated Secure Diffusion 3.5, Stability’s do-over, to ultimately reclaim.

It by no means did. FLUX 1.1 Professional went on to prime the Synthetic Evaluation picture area that October. That one wasn’t open supply, although.

BFL launched FLUX.2 in November 2025 nevertheless it wasn’t as common. The open-source crown held by the unique Flux lasted till Alibaba’s Z-Picture Turbo dethroned it in late 2025, matching its high quality on decrease finish client graphics playing cards. “That is what SD3 was presupposed to be,” one CivitAI person wrote on the time.

FLUX 3 is BFL’s comeback, and it isn’t absolutely open but. Video and Motion are in early entry now by way of APIs and choose companions, mimic robotics amongst them, with picture technology following “within the coming weeks,” per BFL. The open-weight Dev model, the one tier BFL plans to launch for native use, isn’t due till later in 2026.