Krea 2: SOTA open-weights 12B image model

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!

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!

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.

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

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

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?

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