Image generation

This 2018 paper introduces a style-based GAN generator that separates high-level attributes from stochastic variation and allows scale-specific control, improving distribution quality, interpolation, and disentanglement.

A 2021 paper by Rombach, Blattmann, Lorenz, Esser and Ommer that runs diffusion models inside the latent space of pretrained autoencoders, cutting the compute needed for high-resolution image synthesis while adding cross-attention for text and bounding-box control.

An open-weight text-to-image model released publicly by Stability AI on 22 August 2022, built on latent diffusion and small enough to run on consumer GPUs, which made local image generation widely accessible.

Deepfake is synthetic media: images, video or audio made or altered with AI. The term, a blend of "deep learning" and "fake", appeared in late 2017 and now names a whole class of face-swapping and manipulation techniques.

CycleGAN learns image-to-image translation between two domains without aligned pairs, combining an adversarial loss with a cycle-consistency constraint to constrain the mapping.

A 2017 paper by Karras, Aila, Laine and Lehtinen that trains generative adversarial networks by growing the generator and discriminator from low to high resolution, improving stability, quality and variation.

A 2017 paper by van den Oord, Vinyals and Kavukcuoglu proposing VQ-VAE, a generative model whose latent code is discrete rather than continuous, and whose prior is learned rather than fixed, so that useful representations can be learned without supervision.

Runway is a New York-based AI video company founded in 2018. It co-released Stable Diffusion in 2022, has built a series of video models from Gen-1 to Gen-4.5, and in February 2026 raised $315 million at a $5.3 billion valuation.

A 2018 paper by Andrew Brock, Jeff Donahue and Karen Simonyan that trained generative adversarial networks at the largest scale attempted at the time, introduced BigGANs and set a new state of the art in class-conditional image synthesis.

Stability AI is a British generative-AI company founded in 2019 in London. It is known for releasing the open-weight Stable Diffusion image model in 2022, and it has since faced copyright lawsuits over training data.

Diffusion models learn to reverse a gradual noising process, so they can turn random noise into a new image by removing noise step by step. Latent diffusion, which runs this in a compressed space, became the basis of Stable Diffusion.

A 2020 paper by Jonathan Ho, Ajay Jain and Pieter Abbeel that trained a U-Net to reverse a gradual noising process, making diffusion models a practical rival to GANs and paving the way for DALL-E 2, Imagen and Stable Diffusion.

DALL·E is OpenAI's text-to-image model unveiled on 5 January 2021: a 12-billion-parameter transformer trained on 250 million text-image pairs that generates a picture token by token from a caption.

A 2021 OpenAI paper describing a single 12-billion-parameter autoregressive transformer trained on 250 million image-text pairs, which generates images from text and, evaluated zero-shot, is competitive with domain-specific models.

Midjourney is a San Francisco-based independent research lab that runs an image generator. Founded and led by David Holz, it has never taken outside funding and has been involved in several copyright lawsuits.

DALL·E 2 is an image generator that OpenAI announced on 6 April 2022. It uses a diffusion decoder conditioned on CLIP image embeddings and supports image variations and language-guided editing. OpenAI deprecated its API in late 2025 and shut it down in May 2026.

Imagen is a text-to-image diffusion model announced by Google Research in May 2022, known for pairing a frozen large language model with diffusion and for the DrawBench benchmark; Google did not release it publicly.

Imagen is a text-to-image diffusion model that uses a large pretrained language model to encode prompts; it reached a zero-shot FID of 7.27 on COCO and introduced the DrawBench benchmark.

Midjourney is an AI image generation service from Midjourney, Inc. Its open beta began on 12 July 2022 through a Discord bot, and it later added a website, video generation and new model versions.

A 2022 paper by William Peebles and Saining Xie that replaces the U-Net backbone of diffusion models with a transformer operating on latent patches, showing that image quality improves predictably as compute grows and reaching a state-of-the-art FID of 2.27 on ImageNet 256×256.

PixVerse, founded in 2023 as Aishi Technology, is an AI video generation company whose in-house models power a web app, an API and agent tools; a March 2026 Series C made it a unicorn.

Chinese generative-AI company founded in March 2023 that built the Vidu video model and now describes two lines of work: world generation models and world action models.

Runway Gen-2 is a multimodal video generation system announced in March 2023 that turns text, images or video clips into new video, and was among the first commercially available text-to-video models.

Midjourney V5 is a version of the Midjourney text-to-image model, released in alpha on 15 March 2023 and refined through the 5.x line before being succeeded by V6 in December 2023.

SDXL is Stability AI's open text-to-image diffusion model, announced in July 2023 with a 3.5B-parameter base model and a refiner stage, generating natively at 1024×1024. A distilled version, SDXL Turbo, cut generation down to a single step.

DALL·E 3 is OpenAI's image generation model announced on 20 September 2023 and released inside ChatGPT that October. It turned a user's idea into a detailed prompt before drawing, and was later replaced by GPT Image.

Grok is the chatbot from xAI, first offered in November 2023 to a small waitlist of US users. It has grown into a family of apps and models covering search, images, video and coding agents.

Black Forest Labs is a German AI lab based in Freiburg im Breisgau, founded in 2024 by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann and Patrick Esser. It develops the FLUX image models and raised a $300 million Series B in December 2025.

Stable Diffusion 3, announced by Stability AI on 22 February 2024, is a suite of 800 million to 8 billion parameter models that pairs a diffusion transformer with flow matching.

Apple Intelligence is Apple's personal-intelligence system, announced at WWDC on 10 June 2024 for iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. It runs models on device and uses Private Cloud Compute for larger requests.

Runway's 2024 video generation model, trained jointly on video and images, with finer temporal control such as keyframing; later extended with an API, video-to-video and Act-One performance capture.

FLUX.1 is a family of 12-billion-parameter text-to-image models released by Black Forest Labs on 1 August 2024 in pro, dev and schnell variants. The dev version is open-weight, and the variants carry different licenses.

xAI's Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini, released in August 2024 as a beta for X subscribers, added image input, posted competitive benchmark scores and later had their weights published.

Step-Video-T2V is an open text-to-video model with 30 billion parameters. StepFun released its weights, code, a Turbo variant and a technical report under the MIT license on 17 February 2025.

OpenAI's native image generator built into GPT-4o, released in ChatGPT on 25 March 2025 and later offered in the API as gpt-image-1. It replaced DALL·E 3 and was noted for accurate text rendering and close prompt following.

Runway Gen-4 is a video generation model released on 31 March 2025 that keeps characters, locations and objects consistent across shots, working from reference images and text instructions rather than per-project training.

FLUX.1 Kontext is a family of image models from Black Forest Labs, announced on 29 May 2025, that generates and edits pictures from both text and image inputs. Its open-weight dev variant followed in June 2025.

Nicknamed "nano-banana", Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is Google's image generation and editing model released on 26 August 2025, able to blend images, keep characters consistent across edits and apply targeted natural-language edits.

Seedream 4.0 is ByteDance Seed's image model released in September 2025, which puts text-to-image generation, image editing and multi-image composition into a single architecture and can output images from 1K up to 4K resolution.

An open-source image generation model from Tencent that handles image understanding and generation inside a single autoregressive mixture-of-experts framework; its code, weights and technical report were released in September 2025.

FLUX.2 is Black Forest Labs' image generation and editing model family, released on 25 November 2025, spanning hosted tiers and open-weight releases, with support for 4-megapixel output and up to 10 reference images.

Vidu S1 is Shengshu's real-time interactive video generation model, released in July 2026. It takes spoken commands as control input, runs on consumer GPUs at 540p and up to 42 frames per second, and keeps generating without drift.

Vidu S2 is a two-part video generation system: S2-Avatar renders interactive digital characters at 720p in real time, and S2-Editing transforms live video streams. Both also produce stereo views for immersive displays.

PixVerse R2 is a real-time world model announced on 22 September 2026, an upgrade to R1 that keeps a navigable world generating while the user moves inside it and holds state across a session.

Emad Mostaque is a British-Bangladeshi former hedge fund manager who founded Stability AI in 2019 and served as its CEO until he resigned in March 2024.

A 2014 paper by Mehdi Mirza and Simon Osindero that adds conditioning data to both the generator and the discriminator, enabling a GAN to generate samples such as MNIST digits conditioned on class labels.

A 2018 paper by Diederik P. Kingma and Prafulla Dhariwal presenting Glow, a flow-based generative model built on invertible 1x1 convolutions, which improved log-likelihood on standard benchmarks and could synthesise and manipulate large images.

Content provenance is a checkable record of where a piece of media came from and how it was edited, attached to the file itself. The C2PA, founded in 2021 by Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic, publishes the technical standard behind it.

Midjourney V1 was Midjourney's first image-generation model, released in February 2022 and used through a bot on the company's Discord server. It produced abstract, painterly images and was replaced by V2 and V3 within months.

Midjourney V3, released on 25 July 2022, was the third model version of Midjourney; it raised image quality sharply by learning from how users behaved, and it produced the image that won a Colorado State Fair digital-art prize.

Midjourney V4 is the fourth-generation image generation model released in alpha on 5 November 2022. It was the first Midjourney model trained on Google TPUs, and reviewers described it as a large step up from V3.

Stable Diffusion 2 is an open-source text-to-image model family released by Stability AI on 24 November 2022, built on a new OpenCLIP text encoder and shipped with upscaling, depth-guided and inpainting models; version 2.1 followed weeks later.

Runway Gen-1 is a video-to-video diffusion model released in February 2023 that restyles existing footage from text or image prompts while keeping the source video's structure. It was among the first commercially available video-generation models.

Amazon Titan is a family of foundation models built by Amazon for Amazon Bedrock, covering text generation, embeddings and image generation. It was announced in 2023 and later succeeded by Amazon Nova.

Stable Video Diffusion is Stability AI's image-to-video model, released on 21 November 2023 as a research preview that turns a single still image into a clip of a few seconds.

Google's second-generation text-to-image model, released in December 2023, whose standout feature was rendering legible text and logos inside generated images.

Midjourney V6 is a version of Midjourney's image generation model, released in alpha on 21 December 2023 and trained from scratch over nine months; its 6.1 update followed in July 2024.

Google's text-to-image model announced at I/O in May 2024, which Google described as its highest-quality image generator, with fewer visual artifacts and improved text rendering.

Hunyuan-DiT is Tencent's open text-to-image diffusion transformer, built for fine-grained English and Chinese prompt understanding. Its 2024 report and weights were released publicly, and human evaluations placed it ahead of several open models but behind leading closed ones.

Kolors is Kuaishou's open-weight text-to-image model, released on 6 July 2024, built on latent diffusion and tuned for both Chinese and English prompts.

A closed text-to-image model from Black Forest Labs, released on 2 October 2024 and available only through an API. Black Forest Labs said it generates six times faster than its predecessor, and it reached the top of the Artificial Analysis image arena leaderboard.

Movie Gen is a set of media foundation models Meta premiered on 4 October 2024. It covers video generation, personalised video, precise video editing and audio generation, and was not released publicly.

A family of text-to-image models from Stability AI, announced in October 2024: the 8.1-billion-parameter Large, a 4-step Turbo variant and the 2.5-billion-parameter Medium, released under a community licence.

Janus-Pro is DeepSeek's January 2025 multimodal model that handles both image understanding and text-to-image generation in one system, released in 1B and 7B sizes as a stronger successor to Janus.

Midjourney V7 is an image generation model released as an alpha to Midjourney's community on 4 April 2025, the first of the company's models to have personalization on by default and the first to add a cheap, fast Draft Mode.

Seedream 3.0 is ByteDance Seed's Chinese–English image-generation foundation model of 2025, improving on Seedream 2.0 in prompt alignment, Chinese text rendering and native 2K output. Seedream 4.0 succeeded it in September 2025.

An open image-editing model from StepFun released in April 2025 under Apache 2.0, pairing a multimodal language model with a diffusion image decoder and shipping weights, inference code and the GEdit-Bench evaluation set.

Imagen 4 is a Google text-to-image model announced on 20 May 2025 that outputs images at up to 2K resolution with improved fine detail and typography, shipping in the Gemini app, Whisk, Vertex AI and Workspace before its API models were retired in 2026.

Midjourney's first video model, released on 18 June 2025, turns an existing image into a short clip of about five seconds. It was presented as the company's first step toward real-time open-world simulation.

Runway Aleph is a video model released in July 2025 that edits an input video by adding, removing or transforming objects, generating a new angle of a scene, or changing style and lighting, across many visual tasks.

A 20-billion-parameter open-weights image generation model released by Qwen in August 2025, notable for rendering text inside images, especially Chinese.

MAI-Image-1 is Microsoft's first image generation model developed entirely in-house, announced on 13 October 2025 and rolled out in Bing Image Creator and Copilot from 4 November 2025.

Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image) is Google's image generation and editing model built on Gemini 3 Pro, announced on 20 November 2025. It renders legible text, pulls live information from Search, and outputs up to 4K.

Runway Gen-4.5 is a video generation model released in December 2025 that topped the Artificial Analysis text-to-video leaderboard and later gained native audio, multi-shot editing and a role as the base for Runway's GWM-1 world model.

Nano Banana 2 is Google's product name for Gemini 3.1 Flash Image, an image generation and editing model in the Gemini API, released in preview on 26 February 2026 and later replaced by Nano Banana 2.1.

Midjourney V8, released as an alpha on 17 March 2026, generates images about five times faster than earlier versions, adds a native 2K mode, and improves rendering of text inside images.

MAI-Image-2 is Microsoft AI's second-generation text-to-image model, released to developers on 2 April 2026 in Microsoft Foundry and the MAI Playground, with faster generation and stronger lighting, skin tones and in-image text.

GPT Image 2 is OpenAI's image generation and editing model released on 21 April 2026, also presented as ChatGPT Images 2.0. It succeeded GPT Image 1 and was followed within months by the Sunburst and Flare model lines.

SenseNova U1 is SenseTime's open-weight multimodal model family, first released in April 2026 under Apache 2.0, which understands and generates images without a separate visual encoder or VAE.

Muse Image and Muse Video are Meta Superintelligence Labs' first media generation models, announced on 7 July 2026. Muse Image launched immediately, and Muse Video entered early preview.

SenseNova U1.5 is SenseTime's open-weight, 8-billion-parameter model that handles image understanding, reasoning and native 4K generation in a single network, without separate vision encoders or VAEs. It is released under the Apache License 2.0.

First author of the latent diffusion paper that underlies Stable Diffusion, and later co-founder and CEO of Black Forest Labs, the company behind the FLUX image models.

David Holz is the founder of Midjourney, a San Francisco independent research lab whose text-to-image tool became one of the best-known AI art generators. He earlier co-founded the hand-tracking hardware company Leap Motion.

Andreas Blattmann is a researcher on generative image models, second author of the latent diffusion paper behind Stable Diffusion, co-author of the Stable Diffusion 3 paper, and a 2024 co-founder of Black Forest Labs, which released the FLUX.1 models.

Patrick Esser is a researcher on generative image and video models: a co-author of the latent diffusion paper that became the basis of Stable Diffusion, lead author of the Stable Diffusion 3 paper, and a 2024 co-founder of Black Forest Labs.

Midjourney V2 was the second model version of Midjourney's image generation model, released on 12 April 2022 and the default model until V3 arrived that July. Midjourney later described it as colorful and painterly but low in coherency.