Among its major announcements, Freepik has introduced F Lite, a groundbreaking AI image generator created in partnership with the Bolivian AI startup Fal.ai. The startup announced their next-generation model on Tuesday. It contains roughly 10 billion parameters and was trained on an internal dataset of approximately 80 million commercially licensed images.
F Lite is available in two distinct versions: standard and texture. The default model optimizes for predictability and speed of response, which is better for users who are looking for more consistent results. The texture variant is more wild and can be touchy. Even if it fails at that, it has proven itself to be amazing at helping creative people generate really high-quality textures.
The creation of F Lite operated under a creative shroud that Freepik has been carrying around for the last half year. The training process required 64 Nvidia H100 GPUs. In this configuration, during the course of two months, this arrangement gave the model unprecedented computational firepower.
Freepik further asserts that F Lite was trained exclusively on “safe-for-work” images. Notably, this decision addresses the deep-seated problems of copyright and fair use as applied to generative AI. The company has not claimed that F Lite produces images that outperform leading image generators such as Midjourney’s V7 or Black Forest Labs’ Flux family.
We’ve been hard at work behind the scenes on this for many months! It feels good to finally let the cat out of the bag! said Javi Lopez, a representative of Freepik. Such is the enthusiasm for the launch, that this statement is a clear indication of Freepik’s ongoing commitment to transform the graphic design landscape with innovation and creativity.
F Lite couldn’t be coming at a better time. As a result, every major tech company is currently in the process of developing media-generating models based on licensed data. Industry participants like Adobe, Bria, Getty Images, Moonvalley, and Shutterstock are figuring it out too to stay relevant in this evolving industry. As generative AI faces scrutiny amid copyright lawsuits involving prominent companies like OpenAI and Midjourney, Freepik’s approach to utilizing licensed data aims to mitigate legal risks while fostering creativity.
The importance of fair use in this expanding context cannot be emphasized enough. As described by legal experts, “Fair use is the right, law is designed to foster,” highlighting the ongoing debate over intellectual property rights in the realm of AI-generated content.
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