CS153 '26: Frontier Systems - Andreas Blattmann, Black Forest Labs

Visual intelligence represents the next critical frontier in AI, shifting from unimodal content generation to unified, multimodal systems capable of reasoning across text, image, audio, and physical action. Andreas Blattmann, co-founder of Black Forest Labs and co-creator of Stable Diffusion, emphasizes that learning from natural representations—rather than human-made text—is essential for developing higher-order intelligence. By integrating action prediction and physical interaction into model training, developers can move beyond static generation toward world modeling and robotics. The success of the Flux model family demonstrates that maintaining a persistent, methodical research culture and utilizing open-weight releases allows for rapid capability updates, such as achieving character consistency. Ultimately, the most robust progress occurs when models are exposed to real-world feedback loops, enabling them to adapt to diverse user preferences while maintaining rigorous safety standards through infrastructure-level guardrails.