alt Hacker NewsThere has been a long history of AI model releases made shortly before or after a major planned release by another company. Almost always to upstage or steal thunder.
Just recently, Minimax H3 released as open weights on the eve of Seedance 2.5 global availability. It's not as good, but it's good enough and it's completely open.
Flux 3, which is nowhere near as good as either, suddenly announced their release once news of these other two became public. They knew if they waited they'd be ignored. It didn't really help them much, unfortunately.
The LLM releases are even more rivalrous.
And don't forget all of the competing launches planned before Google IO or major release events.
Companies like to eat into the news and press cycle of their rivals.
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I've seen it here on HN (it's particularly noticeable via the /active page) multiple times. If Google, OpenAI or Anthropic release something significant, odds are good you'll see a headline from one of the others.
BFL is in a rough spot here too. It’s pretty much looking like a repeat of the exact same situation they had when they released Flux2 at the same time Z Image Turbo came out and completely overshadowed their launch.
Minimax H3 can run exceptionally fast (10 minutes for a 15 second 0.5mp video and that's stock cuda 13), works on 16 GB VRAM GPUs, etc. If Flux3 is anything like Flux2, it’s going to require an absolute monster truck of a machine and still run significantly slower. Even if it’s a better model, that won’t matter as much if nobody releases any LoRAs or fine-tunes for it.
Not to mention BFL licensing often feels deceptively confusing and restrictive.