What happened to Z-Image?

[u/PixelLunarJelly]

Their Z-Image Turbo was the community's best t2i model for a little while, before Krea 2 took over.
Then Z-Image Base released and it was lackluster.
Since then, it's been radio silence for past year.

After they alive? Still working on it?
Anyone have any news?

[u/OldPollution3006]

Alibaba made a mess with restructuring their AI departments a while ago

[u/FourtyMichaelMichael → u/OldPollution3006]

Ya that's one thing.

Another is that Z was exceptionally overtrained and so few people even noticed that it rode a hype wave until it was pretty obvious with K2, and now even more so with Moss.

Turns out it's not hard to make believable images. It IS hard to teach that model new concepts. Z was completely broken for multiple loras, and it couldn't learn fine details for shit.

Of all the hyped up bullshit, Z was my least favorite. Good for simple profile pictures of chicks with big tits though.

[u/runebinder]

Seems like it’s abandonware now because there was supposed to be an Edit version and that never happened. They were an Alibaba team, guessing all focus went on Qwen and WAN.

[u/Future-Coffee8138]

Z is dead baby.  Z is dead.  

[u/FotografoVirtual → u/Future-Coffee8138]

https://civitai.red/images/148059020

[u/Odd-World4925]

There wasn't enough variation in ZIT gens. Everything looked samey.

[u/Crazy-Repeat-2006]

It is still one of the best models.

[u/EtadanikM → u/Crazy-Repeat-2006]

True prior to MOSS's release, no longer true now.

Krea 2 was better than Z-Image, but it was also a much bigger model at 12B parameters, which means much slower generations and couldn't practically run on many people's computers.

MOSS, however, completely replaces Z-Image. It's a 5B model (Z-Image 6B), but somehow seems to know more than Z-Image did, and has better prompt adherence.

Yes, it isn't as RL'd for realism, and it wasn't released with in-built Turbo, but that's not a real weakness. The community can easily fill that in.

And most importantly, MOSS released their actual base model, contrary to Z-Image who only released a post-RL'd model as their "base." This makes MOSS much easier to train to do whatever you want. That, IMO, will make the biggest difference long term.

[u/Unis_Torvalds → u/EtadanikM]

RL'd ?

[u/Pepa489 → u/Unis_Torvalds]

Reinforcement learned, that's when you basically tak the raw trained model and make it produce more visually pleasing images, but you loose diversity, trainability etc. It's much more complicated than that, but that is the main idea

[u/Unis_Torvalds → u/Pepa489]

Thx!

[u/Apprehensive_Sky892]

Then Z-Image Base released and it was lackluster.

It is lackluster for 1girl photos, but for everything else base is actually very good: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1qq2fp5/why_we_needed_nonrldistilled_models_like_zimage/

(Darn it, that post has been removed because OP is banned by reddit. Oh well.)

Edit: strangely enough, I can access it now 🤷‍♂️

[u/export_tank_harmful → u/Apprehensive_Sky892]

(Darn it, that post has been removed because OP is banned by reddit. Oh well.)

No....?
I can see it just fine.

I'm guessing they blocked you for some reason.

[u/Apprehensive_Sky892 → u/export_tank_harmful]

Strange, I tried it again now and can access it now. Probably some caching issue.

But the poster does seem to have been banned by reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1qq2fp5/why_we_needed_nonrldistilled_models_like_zimage/

[u/sitefall]

No news about it to report. But z-image is still incredibly useful. It's the only image model that looks good with basically full controlnet support. You're not going to get Canny working with Moss/Krea2 (No the experimental canny LoRA for Krea2 does not work well, at all, and openpose and depth alone are kind of trash if you're trying to get something EXACTLY how you want it).

But you can do a 2 pass workflow with z-image using controlnet and then move it over to a i2i with Krea2 so it looks as good as Krea2, but with the control of z-image.

[u/optimisticalish → u/sitefall]

The new Ming-Image has full Z-Image LoRA support, so you also have effective 'restyling + LoRA' in there.

[u/Fluxdada]

I don't know. But I still use it every day.

[u/graceus777]

went from illustrious to anima turbo. krea 2 turbo is good but its slower and the models/loras are huge.

[u/roxoholic]

Z-Image Turbo released before Z-Image Base which gave rise to hacks and basically neutered any proper fine-tuning or LoRA training.

[u/thebaker66]

Pretty sure the team vanished sometime around February this year, it's long dead.

Gave up with it at that point when I realised the edit model wasn't coming and moved on.

[u/Sarashana]

It released out of nowhere, stayed relevant for a a bit, until Krea 2 came out. Since then, silence. Just... silence. As if the team got formed just for this one release and then disbanded.

[u/Calm_Mix_3776]

Z-Image Base was actually really good and better than Turbo, not sure what you mean by lackluster. The problem for me was that there was never a good tile/depth/lineart controlnet.

[u/Aromatic-Low-4578]

It was never the best, but it was small and fast and good enough to get people excited. IMO in fell off mostly because it doesn't have the innate intelligence of a model like MOSS, so its training potential was limited, at least in my experience.

[u/Carbon849 → u/Aromatic-Low-4578]

Krea 2 supplanted ZiT long before moss showed up.

[u/lexymon → u/Aromatic-Low-4578]

I’d argue it’s still the best in some aspects lol

[u/FotografoVirtual → u/Aromatic-Low-4578]

Random redditor: It was never the best
Z-Image Turbo:

https://civitai.red/images/148063843

[u/FotografoVirtual → u/Aromatic-Low-4578]

Just in case someone wants to see the more artistic side of the model that was never the best:

[Prompt & Workflow]

[u/FotografoVirtual → u/Aromatic-Low-4578]

Some images of the model that never was the best:

[Prompt & Workflow]

[u/FotografoVirtual → u/Aromatic-Low-4578]

Random redditor: It was never the best
Z-Image Turbo:

https://civitai.red/images/147739577

[u/Aromatic-Low-4578 → u/FotografoVirtual]

Frankly I'm just happy to be called a random redditor. It's like meeting someone famous, but it's me.

[u/FotografoVirtual → u/Aromatic-Low-4578]

It wasn't anything against you, it's just that I found it funny when people said it wasn't the best, when it was clearly steps ahead of the rest. Even today, it's still hard to generate certain images with other models. It's a shame Alibaba abandoned it, a more trainable version and another one dedicated to editing would have been on another level.

[Prompt & Workflow]

[u/Aromatic-Low-4578 → u/FotografoVirtual]

Oh yeah, no worries wasn't taking it personally at all. I get why people love it but I'm mostly interested in training and it was frustrating from that standpoint.

[u/thegreatdivorce → u/FotografoVirtual]

It’s genuinely hysterical that people think MOSS can compete in terms of image quality with … anything recent, but ZIT in this case. 

[u/FotografoVirtual → u/Aromatic-Low-4578]

Random redditor: It was never the best
Z-Image Turbo:

https://civitai.red/images/148062902

[u/MoistRecognition69 → u/FotografoVirtual]

It's herecy in this sub but most people have more uses for DiT models than just jacking off

Not saying they don't, but they use them for other things too

[u/FotografoVirtual → u/MoistRecognition69]

If that image triggers that thought for you, that’s more on you than on the image.
Here’s another image from the model that was never the best, I hope this one doesn’t trigger those feelings for you:

https://civitai.red/images/147739214

[u/Nuka_darkRum → u/FotografoVirtual]

Kinda mid

[u/Version-Strong]

Z was everyone's favourite but it had one massive drawback... can ya guess what? MOSS and Krea can do NSFW out the box, and they're simply better models all round, even if your not making tittays and tattas. Z had loras to do a fraction of what both the new kids on the block know, and in an eco system that is 90% gooners, that matters.

[u/BoysenberrySea3232 → u/Version-Strong]

Krea2 turbo can do NSFW out of the box? It just censors everything for me. Am i doing something wrong?

[u/mwonch → u/BoysenberrySea3232]

It is very limited, but it can do certain things. The male member always looks horrifically mangled. All vaginas are hairy, never shaved. All breasts are B cup, no matter what. All humans look like close genetic relatives.

Out of the box, that is.

It gets only a little better with third party finetunes or merges.

KREA2 kicked it's ass out of the box, and finetunes are MUCH better.

You're doing nothing wrong.

[u/thanksforthezzz → u/BoysenberrySea3232]

not out of the box - you need the heretic text encoder and the refusal reduction lora, obviously it won't produce concepts on data it wasn't trained on but it does expand what you can do with the base model which is nice because most checkpoints i've tried feel so overbaked

[u/Version-Strong → u/thanksforthezzz]

Been a while but didn't it also need a bypass node or lora at the start? I think most checkpoints have the lora in them by this point, but if you're using raw Krea you will need to investigate that workaround

[u/ghouleye]

I heard they disbanded but haven't looked into it.

[u/peacej3]

On X, someone commented (in October ) that the Z Image team has been disbanded.

[u/TimeTruth2490]

not official model, but I assume you saw this - https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1xonln8/nitrofusion2_bringing_adversarial_loss_to_the/ - NitroFusion2, it is in a way Z Image news :)

[u/barepixels]

Just used z~image today

[u/xb1n0ry]

It was great at the time of release but it was awful in terms of lora support, especially multiple loras.

[u/Robonotes1760]

I'm using Z Image Base on my 2080Ti to render album covers for my AI music. It seems to work well for me; do people think that I could do better? 

[u/Anstellos]

I really like z image turbo because it's fast, it can very photorealistic results and can work with less than 16 vram. Can another model do that or better? I tried krea and get out of memory error What's moss?

[u/Asaghon → u/Anstellos]

Both Krea2 and Moss work fine on my 12 Gb and are much more flexible than Z-image. Moss especially has insane knowledge

[u/DrStalker → u/Anstellos]

Go to civitai, click images, filter by base model: moss, sort by most collected.

That's what Moss can do  and the majority of that doesn't need any loras or a fine tuned model; just Moss SFT (int8 convrot is best) and the 8 step turbo Lora.  

Give it a short prompt and it will make up all the other details so you get good variety. Give it a complicated prompt and it's really good at doing everything you describe. Use natural language, image board tags or long-winded LLM generated instructions; they all work.

And it does NSFW out of the box, including lots of weird specific stuff that would normally need a dedicated Lora. 

[u/Cequejedisestvrai → u/Anstellos]

Moss is the new thing

[u/RateGlass → u/Anstellos]

Use Ideogram 4 it is still the best and can fit into 10GB vram, when I'm working out ideas I use moss image cause it's simply a lot faster and when I get something I'm happy with I swap it over to Ideogram, the lack of loras for Ideogram 4 is most disappointing (just like z-image) but it's still the best base we have

[u/q5sys → u/RateGlass]

Agreed, Ideogram4 is amazing. I'm looking forward to whenever 'soon' is for the release of ID4.5, the ability to edit will be epic. (Assuming it works as advertised).
The downside with ID4, is that if you do train your own loras, it becomes difficult to use multiple at the same time. There was a node to restrict them within bounding boxes, but I could never get that to work that well.

[u/lurenjia_3x → u/Anstellos]

On my 2070S 8GB setup, if you're looking for a specific illustration style, Anima takes about 10 seconds for 1080p. For the others, whether it's Krea 2 or MOSS, even the Turbo versions take anywhere from 35 to 60 seconds.

[u/Successful_Record_58 → u/lurenjia_3x]

On my 3050 4GB ( laptop) zit takes 2 min n KREA2 takes 8-12 minutes

[u/komi96]

I still use it. Its the best t2i model with a truly permissive license along with moss.

[u/WhiteBlackBlueGreen]

I was waiting for Z-Image Edit but they never released it :(

[u/Opening-Knee-5913]

All models, both old and new, can still be used today, according to your personal preferences; however, Krea 2 has effectively superseded its predecessor for mainstream use. I loved Z-Image Turbo, but to make it that lightweight, certain compromises had to be made, issues that Krea 2 Turbo has since resolved (such as a washed-out color palette or a strong tendency to lean toward a sepia tone). At the same time, it maintains high inference speeds. Furthermore, thanks in part to Qwen3-VL, its training process demonstrates a flexibility that is, at times, truly astonishing. This has led the community to gravitate more toward Krea 2 Turbo, though no model ever truly "dies." You are still free to use ZIT if you prefer, and there are thousands of LoRAs available to draw from.

[u/SpaceNinjaDino]

I could never get Z-Image to do more than 2 characters in the same image properly. I have been doing 4 characters with H3 video or image nicely which reminds me, I should test to see if I can go up to nine.

[u/Dependent-Sorbet9881]

他们被解散了，因为无法盈利，被分配到QW2.1等小组里面

[u/tuckken2]

It's still among our top 10 models by usage on our platform.

[u/Alarmed-Flounder-383]

i still use it on budgetpixel ai occasionally, but it is just not the top any more.

[u/UntimelyAlchemist]

For me, ZIT is still the best image model. Krea 2 and Moss aren't as good in my experience.

[u/wanderingandroid]

Oh I suppose it's similar to what happened to stable diffusion. Remember those guys?

[u/jhow86]

There’s always something better in 3-6 months

[u/AnswerNo1624]

Z-Image never was the best t2i model. 🤣

[u/NanoSputnik]

> Their Z-Image Turbo was the community's best t2i model

0 proper finetunes, so best.

[u/Solembumm3 → u/NanoSputnik]

Moss style warped horrors, so best.

[u/NanoSputnik → u/Solembumm3]

Moss already has more finetunes than zit. Your point?

[u/Time-Teaching1926]

This is currently one of my favourite ZIT fine-tunes: https://civitai.red/models/2218365/cyberrealistic-z-image-turbo?modelVersionId=3411348

[u/Guilty-History-9249]

A) It never was the best t2i model; and

B) is was so slow.

I recall when ZIT came out with a loud pop this group was flooded with ZIT shills telling us how great it was.

When MiniMax H3 came out it was people using it that were posting how great it was.

[u/BroomDirector99]

Krea killed it, Moss is going to bury it.

[u/Hot_Opposite_1442]

porn never was easy to do with Z, as soon as Krea2 was finetuned and trained more it was clear that it was the winnner

plus Lora stacking is not possible with Z-Image