Qwen-Image-2.1: Compact, efficient, and unified image creation
164 points by jmillikin 3 hours ago | 67 comments

jjcm 2 minutes ago
I run a prompt-to-ui design site that uses image models for the design process[1]. The text rendering especially makes this model deeply interesting to me, despite the license. Here are some tests using my harness comparing the outputs of gpt-image-2 and qwen 2.1:

https://html.non.io/qwen-comparison/

The text rendering definitely is much, much better than anything else on the open weights market right now. Small text fidelity is quite good. It seems like the text encoder however gets a little bit overloaded with larger prompts - note the presence of hex codes in the design output, those were inputs from the expanded prompt.

I'll be trying a post-training run on this for web design, it has some serious potential.

[1] diffui.ai

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jfoster 2 hours ago
A lot of the previous Qwen models seem to have used Apache licenses, among others:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwen#List_of_models

Unfortunately, it looks like this model is using a much more restrictive license:

https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-Image-2.1/blob/main/LICENSE

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kloud 29 minutes ago
Calling open-weights as open-source in marketing materials is the usual misrepresentation. But now with the restriction on commercial use (which is against opensource definition) it is not even open-weights, technically it would be more accurate to call it weights-available.
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unrented7977 46 minutes ago
I'm willing to bet a nonzero amount of its training material is GPL, so I'll treat it as GPL licensed instead and use it however the fuck I want.

If AI labs get to ignore licenses, so do we.

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user43928 15 minutes ago
It's not going to matter unless you plan to commercially deploy the model, as far as I see.

If you were to generate outputs for commercial use, I think it would still violate this research license, but it's not like they are going to know, are they?

That said, I am disappointed that the model is not actually open-weights as I expected based on the headline.

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JaggerJo 20 minutes ago
Agreed.
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gregoriol 2 hours ago
Was going to post about this: the last image models with Apache 2.0 license seem to be from 2025, recent Qwen models are "non-commercial use".
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bloaf 55 minutes ago
I love the non-commercial clauses because of how many people are using these for deceptive ads and “virtual staging” and fake social media accounts. Anything that makes those guys lives harder while still letting me make silly pictures for my kids and tapestries for my D&D campaign feel fine by me.
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user43928 12 minutes ago
This achieves absolutely nothing to that end.

People can continue to use closed SOTA models to generate outputs for commercial or malicious purposes.

What this research license achieves is that we cannot use this model in applications we publish.

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tenuousemphasis 41 minutes ago
You think they care about the probably unenforceable license terms?
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Luker88 53 minutes ago
Companies can use llm to license-wash open source code regardless of license.

How difficult would it be to use this model to create a second model without licensing issues?

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Zambyte 48 minutes ago
Why would you even do that? Just... use it? There hasn't been any legal precedent on if models can even be copyright restricted. Labs just keep publishing license documents as if they matter.
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zdragnar 38 minutes ago
Well, it is an indication that it matters to the lab, so if you don't want legal fees to be the first one to set precedent, then it does matter a great deal.
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plufz 32 minutes ago
What are the top image models that still use a less restrictive license today?
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vunderba 14 minutes ago
Boogu-Image has the Apache 2.0 License [1] (good coherence, but outputs can look synthetic).

And Krea 2 has a community license [2] that is fairly permissive - I think commercial usage is allowed under $1 million.

Boogu-Image scored 6/15 and Krea 2 scored 7/15 on my GenAI Showdown benchmark [3] - only Ideogram4 eclipses them in terms of local models, but its got a far more restrictive license and the JSON structured inputs can be a pain to work with.

[1] - https://github.com/Boogu-Project/Boogu-Image

[2] - https://www.krea.ai/krea-2-licensing

[3] - https://genai-showdown.specr.net/?models=fd,hd,kd,qi,f2d,zt,...

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docheinestages 20 minutes ago
My first impression is that it's not so good at following prompt directions. I asked it to place a 3D text made of glass in a particular city. It instead gave me a broken 3D text on a white background. Maybe with different seeds it gets better, but it's more of a trial and error process than reliable results.
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colesantiago 2 minutes ago
While the license of this model is a shame it is still unenforceable.

I know a few friends of mine who are running models and are ignoring the licence.

Whether it is AGPL 3.0, or a completely restrictive license, it is going to get broken anyway and be used for commercial purposes.

I don't know anyone who looks at the licenses of the OSS software they are using.

In today’s world OSS is synonymous with "Free" and the AI model providers are proof of that with their training of code, datasets, etc.

So it begs the question, why should we abide by their licenses of their models?

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fishfasell 2 hours ago
The capabilities of local LLM text-to-image is honestly pretty damn impressive. IMO, I think local image generation is currently ahead of local code generation. I can get an image in seconds locally with the quality being way higher than what I'd expect from a local model. However with coding it's much slower and much less impressive. I'm sure there's a reason for this and I'm not an AI expert so I'll let the smarter folks tell me why, but that's just been my observation thus far.
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mft_ 2 hours ago
I've played with diffusion models on and off since the first release of Stable Diffusion - just for amusement, without a particular goal.

Recently, I've been helping a friend's wife with some basic vector images for her sewing hobby (she has what is essentially a CNC sewing machine) and have been super-impressed with FLUX.1-Kontext, which I've been running on my Macbook Pro with mflux. Its ability to (for example) take a photo of a human or an animal and return a line drawing which is recognisably them (rather than just a generic similarish image as I've experienced with other models) is excellent.

It's an older model now, but (AIUI) has the text-handling features baked in, and in my various testing is very reliable at giving me the outputs that I want, without the randomness I've experienced previously. It's big and relatively slow (~3 mins per 512x512 image edit on my M1 Max Mac) but excellent to work with. It's also very straightforward to set up, without the harness complexity of e.g. comfyui.

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jLaForest 57 minutes ago
is the cnc sewing machine an off the shelf model or something DIY? I'd love to hear more
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mft_ 53 minutes ago
Off the shelf - it’s a Brother. It prints via a proprietary file format (.PES) but there’s an extension for Inkscape that supports creation and export.
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gavmor 14 minutes ago
Remember that quality output is a necessary but insufficient property of a generative model.

Prompt-adherence is really hit-or-miss—especially if one lacks the visual vocabulary. Likewise with coding, I find junior devs don't think to prompt re: respecting this-or-that interface, or refactoring to point-free style, etc.

So, as others have said, the artist knows better.

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victorbjorklund 2 hours ago
I mean I’m sure it’s the reverse for an artist. They would be less impressed with the image and more impressed with the code quality
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26d0 35 minutes ago
The point I think is interesting is that this is just 7B. The current SOTA 7B LLMs are barely usable for quite simple coding.
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gedy 2 hours ago
To generalize, LLMs are great at what you are not skilled at.
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k__ 28 minutes ago
That's how they're sold, isn't it?
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fishfasell 2 hours ago
That's a fair statement, I agree. I'm quite an abysmal artist so I could be a victim of my own bias here
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mdp2021 2 hours ago
How do you use this model locally, similarly to using `llama-server -m <model>`?

(I mean: outside direct or substantial use of Python, and running the Neural Network in the most efficient way.)

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nkhgfugjk 39 seconds ago
I am using sd.cpp, which is the cousin of llama.cpp: https://github.com/leejet/stable-diffusion.cpp

it already has day-0 qwen image 2.1 support!

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rwmj 10 minutes ago
Additional question is what kind of local hardware would be required for this? 7B parameters sounds very light weight, but I'm not sure.
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Iolaum 2 hours ago
There is difussion.cpp which is intended for those types of models. I set up krea-2-turbo with the help of ChatGPT 2 months ago, if you have a capable computer that's what I would suggest once it becomes supported.
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ramesh31 3 minutes ago
Tell Claude "get qwen-image-2.1 up and running"

Just one-shotted it in ~10 minutes.

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fp64 2 hours ago
on the linked GitHub page they list support Diffusers, ComfyUI, vLLM-Omni, SGLang, and LightX2V with links to each
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mdp2021 33 minutes ago
> Diffusers, ComfyUI, vLLM-Omni, SGLang, and LightX2V

I think that's all Python (not a direct executable).

You could just do (see the "Quick Start") four `pip install` and have a dozen lines script to generate the image. But `llama.cpp` and similar do not require e.g. installing Torch (or PyTorch) - you can use `llama.cpp` on a non-specialized machine.

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embedding-shape 2 hours ago
Probably ComfyUI is one of the easiest way to get started with local image/video models. Or perhaps vLLM, if they have support for it already, would be something like `vllm serve <model> --omni --port 9080`
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utopiah 2 hours ago
why not just as you suggested i.e. https://qwen.readthedocs.io/en/latest/run_locally/llama.cpp.... then get the result either via a UI or wget/curl it back?
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mdp2021 2 hours ago
I am not sure that llama.cpp also supports image generation models.
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utopiah 2 hours ago
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exe34 2 hours ago
Multimodal doesn't guarantee input and output.

> Currently, we support image, audio and video input.

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utopiah 47 minutes ago
Seems I'm missing something. Does this model support other inputs?

Image outputs are supported, videos I'm not sure but I don't think that's an output, just a preview of the equirectangular example, so, same question here, what does this model outputs that isn't supported?

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mdp2021 17 minutes ago
Not all architectures are supported by llama.cpp . The GGUF format encodes the NN in a standardized way, but then you need code that can use that NN structure.

I understand that llama.cpp could only output text, last time I checked (I do not know how to find a good source for that though).

See https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/src/llama-... , the

  enum llm_arch {
...
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exe34 20 minutes ago
It's a diffusion model, completely different from autoregressive attention models.
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gunalx 2 hours ago
Its happy to see a new open image model from qwen. But the license is a let down. And it dosent even beat their closed qwen3 image wich is already a bit old.
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yorwba 51 minutes ago
Qwen Image 3 was released two months ago: https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-image-3.0 I think you have it confused with another model.
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trains39472 2 hours ago
A 7B diffusion model can now render CJK text better than Microsoft Windows.
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doctorpangloss 33 minutes ago
Ideogram 4 has been around for a while haha
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tomjen3 2 hours ago
Just think about how recently we got that feature in the official ChatGPT image gen. And now we have that running locally — assuming that is, I can figure out how to get this running on my Mac — blows my mind.
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jimmydoe 48 minutes ago
Is ChatGPT really that good?

Back in Apr, ChatGPT Images 2.0 has some broken Chinese texts in its featured examples, and they later removed that from blog post. Is 2.5 better now?

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Havoc 60 minutes ago
Pretty sure comfyui has a mac executable
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samayashar 19 minutes ago
Qwen and Alibaba are the biggest competitor for basically every model out there. They're beating the benchmarks like top-frontier models, focused on open-source and much cheaper than the competitors.

Excited to see what the future holds for them!

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d2kx 2 hours ago
God I love the Qwen team. Easily the most diverse set of models from all the Chinese labs. Only Gemini/DeepMind comes close.
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hgufj 2 hours ago
I am really grateful to the Chinese Labs for open sourcing their best models. If it was left to the Americans, we would be forced to pay obscene API fees to use them.
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jfoster 2 hours ago
Note that the license on this has this in it:

> You shall not use the Materials for any commercial purpose without obtaining a separate commercial license from us.

It probably will be much cheaper to use than other image models, but it seems that will be up to the whims of Qwen/Alibaba rather than just being the cost of putting it in a cloud provider.

https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-Image-2.1/blob/main/LICENSE

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tenuousemphasis 37 minutes ago
Good luck to them enforcing that license.
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trentor 2 hours ago
They finally fixed their VAE. It really held back their models over the last 2 years.
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mdp2021 40 minutes ago
> finally fixed their VAE

Can you share the sources?

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trentor 17 minutes ago
It's right there in the hugging face link?

latents go from 16ch @ 8x compression to 64ch @ 16x, so roughly the same total latent budget but much more channel heavy. It’s also deeper/wider, and the old 2x2 transformer patching is gone.

On some images it still produces artifacts but can't say if it's the transformer or the VAE yet.

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Hard_Space 2 hours ago
Interesting in the example of assembling the Cheers team how the otherwise great result genericizes Shelley Long.
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hughc 2 hours ago
The result seems a pretty good representation given the source image wasn't that great. I think that Woody Harrelson comes across much worse.
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TomGarden 2 hours ago
Very impressive, and kind of worrying a 7B model can have such capabilities. The implications are huge. And Qwen does no watermarking (yet) yeah?
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trentor 2 hours ago
They always had a fourier space mark in their models even without the VAEs are usually pretty easy to detect.
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TomGarden 2 hours ago
Ah I wasn't aware, thank you
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spottedmarley 2 hours ago
Boy do I love waking up to find a new awesome toy from the Qwen team waiting for me to play with! Pulling it now
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bknight1983 58 minutes ago
While I'm impressed with the Bluey example, the lack of Muffin disappoints me.
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weee322 2 hours ago
[flagged]
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BlackGlory 2 hours ago
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reedf1 2 hours ago
Context?
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JimDabell 2 hours ago
People say ChatGPT generates images with a yellow tint. The person you are replying to is suggesting that these images have a yellow tint and therefore this model is distilled from ChatGPT.
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hn45e7pbij 2 hours ago
Image gen you eyeball one frame and stop, code needs hundreds of tokens all correct in sequence, one bad line and the whole thing fails.
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