Buzzy German AI startup Black Forest Labs is no longer working with Elon Musk’s xAI, Sifted has learned.
The secretive startup, based near the Black Forest in Freiburg, burst onto the AI scene in August last year with a suite of text-to-image models that experts said surpassed US competitors like OpenAI and Midjourney.
Black Forest Labs gained further attention after it inked a partnership with xAI, developing an AI-image generation tool for its chatbot Grok.
The company faced criticism over the partnership, after users claimed its FLUX-1 model lacked proper safeguards, with users able to generate fake images of Donald Trump smoking marijuana, among others, Techcrunch reported at the time.
A source close to Black Forest Labs tells Sifted that partnership has now ended. The company worked with xAI early on as the company experimented with different AI tools, but Musk’s company has since developed its own image-generation models so the partnership has ended, the person added.
It remains unclear when the partnership ended or whether either party terminated the contract.
In December, xAI announced it was upping Grok’s capabilities with a new image generation model named Aurora.
Black Forest Labs has partnerships with companies such as French LLM maker Mistral, where its tech powers image generation on Le Chat, and Deutsche Telekom.
The company’s partnership with xAI sparked broader discussions about the potential misuse of AI-generated images, regardless of the provider.
Founded by Robin Rombach, a well-regarded text-to-image developer who previously built London-based Stability AI’s image generation tool Stable Diffusion.
Black Forest Labs quickly drew the attention of investors, raising a $31m in August last year led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other backers include Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan.
xAI did not respond to Sifted’s request for comment.
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