Challenger to Gemini 3, Nano Banana Pro has launched: Find out here

While the whole of the internet this Thanksgiving is apparently occupied with praises for Google’s Gemini 3, Nano Banana Pro, and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5, German AI startup Black Forest Labs has released a formidable competitor called FLUX.2.

Is FLUX.2 better than Nano Banana Pro and Gemini 3?

Unlike the Nano Banana Pro and Gemini 3, this new image generation and editing system includes four distinct AI models designed for production-grade creative workflows.

Top features of FLUX.2 include multi-reference conditioning, higher-fidelity outputs, and improved text rendering, all of which enhance the company’s open-core ecosystem with both commercial endpoints and open-weight checkpoints.

What is Black Forest Labs' Flux.2 VAE?

While Black Forest Labs initially gained traction for its open-source text-to-image models, FLUX.2 has gone an extra mile, including one fully open-source component: the Flux.2 VAE (variational autoencoder. This model is now available under the Apache 2.0 license.

Flux.2 VAE's enterprise use 

The open-source VAE is essential for enterprises, for it compresses images into a latent space and reconstructs them into high-resolution outputs. This standardised latent space allows companies to integrate FLUX.2's capabilities into their self-hosted systems to provide interoperability.

The availability of this VAE also supports consistent image generation across various models, enabling organisations to adapt to different generators without changing their workflows to the core.

As FLUX.2 emphasises reliability, controllability, and seamless integration into existing creative pipelines, it positions itself as a strong alternative to Google’s flagship AI offerings, particularly challenging the dominance of Gemini Nano Banana Pro in the realm of AI-driven image generation.