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Qwen Image 2.1

740 points · 199 comments · jmillikin

  1. vunderba · · focus · HN ↗
    So thoughts

    Positives

    • It's a heck of a lot smaller than Qwen-Image 1 (20b parameters) at only 7b, making it one of the smaller open-weight models available (Z-Image Turbo is one of the few that is smaller at 6b) when compared to Ideogram, Krea2, Flux2, etc.

    • It supports native transparency (Qwen's team, as far as I know, is the only one attempting to tackle this). Even though it's relatively trivial to set up background removal postprocessors, it's also neat to see it natively supported.

    • It's fast using QwenImage2.1 convrot, a 1MP image took around ~5 seconds on an RTX4090.

    Negatives

    • The license (assuming you respect it) is far more restrictive. The original Qwen Image 1 was released under the standard Apache license; this one explicitly forbids commercial usage without obtaining a separate license. On the other hand, a lot of us didn't expect the Qwen team to ever release "weights-available" ever again.

    Qwen-Image 1.0, released about a year ago, only scored 4/15 on my GenAI Showdown Benchmarks. Since that time, they've been upstaged by Krea 2 (6/15) and Ideogram4 (8/15). I'll post the new results once I have some more time to run them.

    <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;genai-showdown.specr.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;genai-showdown.specr.net

    1. vunderba · · focus · HN ↗
      Well, the results are in, at least for text-to-image (the editing bench will come later).

      Qwen-Image 2.1 is definitely a pretty big leap over the last open-weight version, Qwen-Image 1.0, released back in August of last year and managed to score 7 out of 15 as opposed to its predecessor which scored 4 out of 15.

      Even though it&#x27;s significantly smaller, 7b vs 20b, it&#x27;s multimodal (so you don&#x27;t need a separate image-to-image model like you did with Qwen-Edit), more coherent, and significantly faster even when outputting at higher 2K resolutions. However, in my testing, I found that I had to play with dialing up the CFG depending on the complexity of the prompt.

      I&#x27;ve also added a progress dropdown under Model Performance so you can see how cloud vs. local models have been trending since 2024. Spoiler: June of this year released some of the biggest bangers (Krea 2, Ideogram 4, and the kind of slept-on Boogu-Image 0.1).

      Downsides:

      - It was clearly trained on at least some level of synthetic training data, and it shows in some of the subpar outputs in terms of fidelity. Some of this you might be able to iron out with a refiner model downstream or a custom LoRA but time will tell.

      - They&#x27;ve moved away from the permissive Apache license. Commercial usage is only allowed by request.

      Comparisons:

      <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;genai-showdown.specr.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;genai-showdown.specr.net

      If you just want to compare local models only:

      <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;genai-showdown.specr.net&#x2F;?models=local" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;genai-showdown.specr.net&#x2F;?models=local

      1. meherabhossain · · focus · HN ↗

        [dead]

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