Krea 2: SOTA open-weights 12B image model

https://www.krea.ai/blog/krea-2-technical-report

by mattnewton • 29 days ago

415 47 29 days ago

mattnewton4• 29 days ago

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!

ttul2• 28 days ago

This is a massive technical report for an open weights image gen model. As someone who has followed this space closely, it’s really cool to read about the behind-the-scenes experimentation and effort that went into the final product. I hope you will release some of the find tuning tools so the community can experiment with them as well and really push what the model’s capable of.

mattnewton4• 28 days ago

You can find some links and details in the GitHub readme for finetuning / LoRA support. Ostiris, musubi tuner, fal and hugging face diffusers are all day-0 supported :) https://github.com/krea-ai/krea-2

We recommend training off the undistilled, Raw checkpoint, and then applying the LoRA to the Turbo model for inference.

dvrp7• 28 days ago

Thanks! You should definitely check out the r/stablediffusion sub-reddit; people are going crazy over it!

We also had 0-day support from people like Ostris and ComfyUI from the open source community

vunderba3• 28 days ago

Neat! Between Ideogram4, Flux2, Qwen-Image, ZiT, and Krea - there's been a lot of positive movement in the open-weights space.

The original Flux.1 Krea is actually in my GenAI Showdown benchmark site from all the way back in July of last year (which feels like a lifetime in this space), so I’m looking forward to putting this new one through its paces.

Taek• 28 days ago

What is Krea's approach to content such as pornography and gore? It's been frustrating to see all of the leading models take a very hard line on excluding vice content, even when it is perfectly legal, in the name of safety.

kouteiheika• 28 days ago

What is Krea's approach to content such as pornography and gore?

You mean whether it's censored? Of course it is. They even say so themselves[1]:

The open source version needed to go through some alignment training so there might be some inconsistencies between closed / open version.

The "alignment training" is pretty much a code word for censorship/lobotomy, because unlike the API version they can't slap on a safe/unsafe classifier on an uncensored model. Of course, just to be clear: I don't blame. If they don't do this then the next post we'd see is them being in hot water. (Remember what happened with Grok? That's what happens when you don't take a hard line here.)

[1] -- https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1udnm0a/we...

justinclift• 29 days ago

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

kodablah• 28 days ago

Turbo appears GGUF'd already: https://huggingface.co/Abiray/Krea-2-Turbo-GGUF

khimaros• 28 days ago

RAW here https://huggingface.co/vantagewithai/Krea-2-Raw-GGUF

BoredPositron4• 28 days ago

It's a good model sadly the use of the qwen vae is a bit of a downer.

mobiuscog• 28 days ago

It's been mentioned by some that using the wan2.1 vae instead solves this. I haven't personally had time to try yet.

dvrp7• 28 days ago

There is a lot of discourse about it on Reddit. Check the AMA link I put in the comment above for learning more. The basics is it wasn’t released when we started and we use it for internal models and hope to do further open source releases.

mattnewton4• 28 days ago

Krea 2 Large (on the website and api) was trained with the FLUX 2 VAE, if you want to test it out and push realism. After working with both I think the flux VAE has a slight edge in learning realistic textures but it's smaller than you might think, the Qwen VAE was overall very good in ablations and good at learning to produce a diverse set of styles.

BoredPositron4• 28 days ago

[flagged]

pwython• 28 days ago

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?

sangwulee• 28 days ago

A lot of coffee for sure. Regarding the training cost, it's hard to give a good estimate because we used a shared kubernetes cluster with inference + research workloads.

dvrp7• 28 days ago

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!

ACCount372• 28 days ago

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.

refulgentis• 28 days ago

This model does image to image; whats the issue with Qwen 3 VL; is style transfer unexplained? " reference" is mentioned 11 times on the page (more specifically, I read it and it seemed to discuss it a lot)

dvrp7• 28 days ago

I appreciate the skepticism but we find internally that this model is used more than Nano Banana for many cases like moodboarding (also, 4x cheaper than NBP never hurts). Agentic workflows are compatible with Krea 2 so I’m not sure I follow there. If you are talking about an edit model, that’s coming too.

Also, we are on par with them in t2i benchmarks, check the artificial analysis link I posted in my top comment.

And you cannot re-train nano banana or ChatGPT to understand your brand, which is what our customers complain about constantly.

Plus open-source! It’s hard to do an apple to apple comparison.

ACCount372• 28 days ago

"Compatible" is one thing - "built for" is a different beast. The difference can be like that between Images 1.0 and Images 2.0 - the sheer leap in compositional capabilities was staggering.

"Edit model" is a part of it, yes. So is style transfer. But less as an endpoint and more of a subset of what advanced I2I enables.

"Re-train to understand your brand" is a fine marketing pitch, but in practical terms, it's hard to justify burning a LoRA for most uses. Enthusiasts absolutely do it, but enthusiasts are built different. Robust I2I can accomplish a lot of the same, but with a workflow that's closer to "drag and drop your references" than to "try to get a LoRA to do what you wanted it to do on a very slim set of images".

Modern LoRA pipelines are getting closer to "reliable" and "braindead simple", but you can't escape the "wait N hours for the GPUs to churn" of fine tune no matter what you do. And iteration time kills - a lot of the value of AI in workflows is that it does what it does fast and allows you to iterate at speed.

You can think of "LoRA vs I2I" as of an image twin of "SFT vs in-context learning" of LLM land. Both are useful, neither substitutes for the other fully, but there's a reason why most reach for the latter way before they reach for the former.

I like the T2I from what I've seen, mind. Perhaps more than Images 2.0 or even NB2. I just think that focusing solely on T2I to the exclusion of advanced editing and composition capabilities is a very 2024 thing.

Reubend• 28 days ago

The example images look great. Always good to have more diverse OSS models.

realityfactchex2• 28 days ago

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

Catloafdev• 28 days ago

Image models need software like ComfyUI, not LM Studio.

dvrp7• 28 days ago

here u go: https://ibb.co/XfZSJKyz

you can try it right away at krea.ai/image (warning: you need to sign-up)

realityfactchex2• 28 days ago

Thanks, those are pretty good!

vunderba3• 28 days ago

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,...

taffydavid• 28 days ago

It did fall to the usual “model killers”: the nine-pointed star, Count Rugen, the overcrowded flat Earth.

I'd never heard of text to image model killers so I had a good chuckle at this. Such oddly specific things for us to arrive at as a test method

vunderba3• 27 days ago

Haha yeah, the site automatically assigns the term to any benchmark that fewer than 25% of the tested models are able to pass.

What’s more surprising to me is that, unlike the “pelican riding a bicycle” whose objectivity has been slightly compromised as newer models have incorporated it into their training data, the arbitrary-point star has been wiping models out ever since the early days of Flux back in 2024.

I personally love the test because it's something that even an elementary school child with no artistic experience at all can do, but state of the art models struggle heavily.

einsteinx2• 27 days ago

Speaking of model killers, can they do “wine glass completely full to the top” yet? That‘s the one I used to show people but I haven’t tried it in a while.

Pxtl• 28 days ago

What are people using for self hosting these? I tried ollama with open-webui and it didn't support image generation at all.

kadoban• 28 days ago

I haven't done this model yet, but comfyui will definitely support it and I've found it a nice interface once you get used to it. Copy/paste a workflow to start with if you're lost.

Eisenstein2• 28 days ago

Koboldcpp supports image generation, but you will have to wait for the next release for Krea2 support.

* https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp

Eisenstein2• 27 days ago

Rolling build of Koboldcpp now supports Krea2:

* https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp/releases/tag/rolling

Model weights:

* https://github.com/leejet/stable-diffusion.cpp/blob/master/d...

In the launcher GUI, select 'Image Gen' and set Krea2 Turbo gguf as the image model, Qwen3 VL 4b gguf as the T5 model, and Wan2.1 safetensors as the VAE.

commoner• 28 days ago

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 opensource@krea.ai.
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;

Krea 2: SOTA open-weights 12B image model

Related Stories