Black Forest Labs were founded in 2024 by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser, former employees of Stability AI.

[6][7] Investors in Black Forest Labs included venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Brendan Iribe, Michael Ovitz, Garry Tan, and Vladlen Koltun.

[15] On 18 November 2024, Mistral AI announced that its Le Chat chatbot had integrated Flux Pro as its image generation model.

The models are based on a hybrid architecture that combines multimodal and parallel diffusion transformer blocks scaled to 12 billion parameters.

According to media reports, depictions ranged from an image of Donald Trump posing with guns to disturbing scenes, which triggered discussions about ethical implications of technologies developed by Black Forest Labs.

[29] Ars Technica suspected that Flux is based on a large, unauthorised collection of images scraped from the internet, a controversial practice with potential legal consequences.