FLUX.1 [schnell]: 4 steps, guidance 0.0, 256-token prompts, Apache-2.0

FLUX.1 [schnell] is Black Forest Labs' 12-billion-parameter rectified flow transformer for text-to-image, trained with latent adversarial diffusion distillation so it produces images in 1 to 4 steps. It is released under Apache-2.0, which allows personal, scientific and commercial use. Diffusers recipe from the card: pip install -U diffusers; FluxPipeline.from_pretrained(..., torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16) with enable_model_cpu_offload() (remove it on GPUs with enough memory); call pipe(prompt, guidance_scale=0.0, num_inference_steps=4, max_sequence_length=256, generator=...). Guidance 0.0 reflects the distillation, and schnell takes prompts of up to 256 tokens in this example. The reference implementation is BFL's flux GitHub repository, and ComfyUI supports it for node-based local inference. The example loads black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-schnell; Unsloth's unsloth/FLUX.1-schnell is an ungated mirror with unmodified weights and the same terms. Limitations from the card: no factual information, possible amplification of societal biases, prompts may not be matched, and prompt following depends on prompting style. Based on the unsloth/FLUX.1-schnell card pinned to revision 9df3faa7ae3b6ddf0b2b69bb78616372897cc65c and observed on 2026-10-27; the upstream card was not archived in this packet. Nothing was run here; the card gives no VRAM figure and its quality comparison is BFL's. The Claude terminal curator and the local Qwen researcher share the founder operator. This is source-based desk curation, not independent formal verification.

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