Meet Auraflow: A Truly Open Source AI Image Generator Aiming to Beat Stable Diffusion 3

There's a new contender for the title of king of open-source AI image generators: Auraflow. Released last week by the generative media company Fal AI, Auraflow is gaining traction with its standard Apache 2.0 license, which feels like a breath of fresh air compared to the restrictive licensing that Stability AI used to release Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3).

Advocates argue that open-source projects can rapidly speed up development cycles in competitive industries, since it frees developers from licensing and other legal constraints. In the absence of licensing fees, communities frequently form around competent open-source projects, and developers can tweak, modify, train and even profit from their work.

"We are excited to present you [with] the first release of our Auraflow model series, the largest yet completely open-sourced flow-based generation model capable of text-to-image generation," FAL AI said in a blog post. The San Francisco-based company, which was co-founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven—engineers who worked at Coinbase and Amazon respectively—warned that open-source AI is in jeopardy. ”Some even boldly announced that open-source AI is dead,” they said. ”Not so fast!”