Clearly Google is winning this by some margin
Seedream is also very good and makes me think the next version will challenge Google for SOTA image gen
Increasingly feels like image gen is a solved problem
Seedream is also very good and makes me think the next version will challenge Google for SOTA image gen
Increasingly feels like image gen is a solved problem
Also it doesn't feel solved to me at all. There is no general model, perhaps it cannot reasonably exist. I think these tests are benchmarks are smart, but they don't show the whole picture.
Domain specific image generation tasks still require a domain specific models. For art purposes SD1.5 with specialized and finely tuned checkpoints will still provide the best results by far. It is also limited, but I think it dampened the hype for new image generators significantly.
I understand most outputs could be fine tuned for most domains, but still felt sd1.5 had a resolution ceiling, and a complexity ceiling no matter how good the fine tuning
There's not much of a reason to use SD 1.5 over SDXL if image quality is paramount.
A lot of people (myself included) use a pipeline that involves using Flux to get the basic action / image correct, then SDXL as a refiner and finally a decent NMKD-based upscaler.
Merging any or all concepts is mostly beyond it, but I haven't seen any model being good at it yet. There are some that are significantly better, but often come with other disadvantages.
Overall what these models can do is quite impressive. But if you want a really high quality image, finding the fitting model is as difficult as finding the right prompt. And the general models tend to always fall back to some mean AI standard image.