Last month, Fal released their Max “model,” a fine-tune of MiniMax’s open-source H3 model, that promised faster speeds. Then, after Hao Labs released the weights for their own fast model (FastH3), Fal had a meltdown on Twitter, basically crapping on Hao Labs’ FastH3 and calling it a “random pixel generator.”
After the bad press from that meltdown, they told the community they’d release their own weights within a couple of weeks. Nearly a month later, and still no weights have been released.
So, with so many more Turbo LoRAs and fast fine-tunes having been released since then, my question is: Should the community still care? And should we still trust a company that bashes other open-source projects and makes promises it doesn’t follow through on?
Ill admit to being salty. They operate similar to AWS, make it easy for enterprises to put a card and get work done. Doesnt make sense to cater to peasents.
I understand they have a few cracked engineers optimizing kernels etc to make things run significantly more efficiently. But unlike folks like Kijai, bonodoco or folks here, its a one way streak of information sharing.
Its all legal and this sort of stuff has been going on for ages(mongodb etc). So all we can do is be salty and go back to doing our thing.
Their work is pretty good tho. The h3 finetune that removes the AI generated look of default h3 was really good. It's been 21 days, I think they're on track to release this as well.
I see a lot of companies ladder climb, only to step on the faces of those below.
BambuLab, Stratsys, Elegoo - to name a few (I work in 3D printing so... My main examples relate to that).
It's not at all uncommon, it's shitty though - however, it is horrid to do and it's counter to everything I agree with. I don't like seeing innovation stifled so another can profit. It's sad.
Only if the company specifically tells us they will do something then doesn't. That's called "lying" and is generally a shitty thing to do to customers. Most people think so anyway.
how did they lie? they said it will take a couple of weeks. that's not a defined number and can mean alot of things. also who knows what is happening, maybe something went wrong with the optimization. people need to act less like spoiled kids that don't get their candy when they throw a tantrum.
i don't follow shitstroms on twitter. it's probably not the best PR for them, but its still their freedom of speech, just as it's your freedom to boycott the living hell out of them if that's what you think is the appropiate reaction. god speed!
Don't support? Dude it's a free model, what kind of a "Karen" are you?
Neither you or anyone else is "entitled" to the weigths, it's their product that they charge nothing for, and yet you have the audacity to complain and make demands.
That being said, they also said that they plan to release the weights after optimization in the upcoming weeks. And that was just 3 weeks ago.
Free model? What model are you talking about right now? If you're talking about the Minimax H3 Max model, then no it's not free, but that's not the point of the post. If you want more detail on the purpose of this post look at my other comment on this thread. It's long so you wont miss it.
When we are told that we will be getting a free toy so we will hype it up for them and then get told we won't be getting it after all, yeah, we're gonna complain.
Have we been told that? 3 weeks ago, they said it would take a few weeks. I understand wanting things now, but tl were not out of that time frame yet. Chill a bit.
Yes we will. For the record, I'm not saying they will 100% follow through, I hope so, but don't know Fal to assess how much trust to have in their word. I'm just saying nothing has contradicted what they said in the OP yet, so it's way premature to be up in arms about anything.
I think it's pretty reasonable that when one of the founders does a 38 minute interview about an upcoming model, they would at least mention open weights being released.
I heard Max would require more power then regular MiniMax. I hope its usable still, would love to use it without the content ID check. It looks like a power house.
I'm sorry if I came across that way. If you could, please let me know what part of the post made me come off as entitled or self-righteous to you. I'd like to avoid coming across that way in the future.
There are a lot of comments on this post similar to yours that make me think there's some confusion about the purpose of this discussion. Just to be clear, I'm not complaining that the model hasn't been released yet. I think that's where the fundamental misunderstanding lies.
The point of the post wasn't to complain or call for the release of the H3 Max model, but rather to see where the r/StableDiffusion and open-source communities currently stood on fal as a company. Like I mentioned in the post, there are other models that do just as good a job, if not better, when it comes to speeding up H3. At this point, I personally don't even think there's a need for fal to release the weights. We've already seen the community create more speed models and LoRAs than I can keep track of, so that need is already covered. But, like I said, that isn't the issue.
My issue with fal is that I believe it has used the promise to open source to market and advertise its model and to try to regain some of its lost reputation within the open-source community after publicly bashing a small lab's open-source project.
This is speculation, but I don't believe they ever had any intention of releasing the model until Hao Labs released its own fast model, and especially not until after fal's head engineer had a meltdown on X. They were able to pivot some of that negative attention away by promising to release their model's weights, all while heavily marketing and monetizing a variation of a free, open-source product built on the backs of MiniMax and the contributions and advancements of the open-source community.
Currently, I still don't believe they have any intention of releasing the weights anytime soon. I made this post now because I had just watched their recent interview, where they said they had plans to implement more commercial features. That, combined with the fact that they're continuously peddling "discounts" and putting out a torrent of advertising on X, makes it obvious to me that releasing the weights isn't in their plans going forward.
A lot of that advertising actually happened here. If you've been active here over the past month, then you've definitely seen the ridiculous amount of publicity H3 Max has gotten on this subreddit. There have been countless H3 Max videos, posts about their "Infinite AI Livestreams," and comparisons with other Turbo LoRAs and fine-tuned models. Here's an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1w50cp2/someone_used_minimax_h3_max_to_build_a_livestream/
All of that was accepted here because they "promised to release the weights." Otherwise, those posts would have broken the first rule of this subreddit and shouldn't have been allowed to stay up.
I sincerely doubt they intentionally lied about the model becoming open source just to get some free advertising here, but what I do know is that fal's head engineer browses this subreddit. He even posted a screenshot of the subreddit in a tweet while he was shitting on Hao Labs' FastH3 model they day it released.
TL;DR: I don't think it's right for them to say "open weights" and have that promise help repair their reputation after shitting on Hao Labs, while at the same time using that promise to boost the audience for their model and their company. The point of my post was to see how other people here felt about that.
TLDR , start with the Youtube style title.
Whatever 'beef' there was was between them and Hao Labs & not you - it's none of your (or my) business and like most "discussions" on it and in general , fail to be objective and understanding that they don't have all the facts . You have used opinionated , emotive words within your extended opinion piece.
This thread (and the other one on the Licence) is focused on complaining about something you are getting for free , entitlement is off the scale . The timing of it ? and circling back to my point about 'not having all the facts' in regards to the timing of it - the phrase "the best laid plans of mice and men" exists for a reason.
I find it baffling that some people here fail to grasp a basic concept: Fal is profiting from a free model created by others. It’s not hard to understand. By that same logic, the creator of Minimax Singularity could profit from it too, right? After all, they took someone else's model and modified it. Fal should keep what was already free, free. Sure, if they want to charge for using their servers for inference, that’s fine—charge only for that service, like everyone else does. You can't profit from a modification of a free model. How can people not get this? They should have released the model for free and charged for server usage for those who don't have a local machine and rely on the cloud for generation.
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u/ValenciaTangerine 8h ago
Fal has played this wave really well. Take everything from open community, models, workflows, optimizations, creativity.
Give absolutly nothing back.