New Year's AI surprise: Fal releases its own version of Flux 2 image generator that's 10x cheaper and 6x more efficient

Hot on the heels of its new $140 million Series D fundraising round, the multi-modal enterprise AI media creation platform fal.ai, known simply as "fal" or "Fal" is back with a year-end surprise: a faster, more efficient, and cheaper version of the Flux.2 [dev] open source image model from Black Forest Labs.

Fal's new model FLUX.2 [dev] Turbo is a distilled, ultra-fast image generation model that’s already outperforming many of its larger rivals on public benchmarks, and is available now on Hugging Face, though very importantly: under a custom Black Forest non-commercial license.

It’s not a full-stack image model in the traditional sense, but rather a LoRA adapter—a lightweight performance enhancer that attaches to the original FLUX.2 base model and unlocks high-quality images in a fraction of the time.

It’s also open-weight. And for technical teams evaluating cost, speed, and deployment ...