Why haven't we got an SOTA open image edit model yet?

Hey guys, really wondering now why we got (SOTA or at least good enough) open weights on nearly every use case, like LLMs, T2I (Krea2), music (Yue2), video generation (Minimax H3), but not image edit? Don't get me wrong. Flux2-Klein 9B ist fine, for small image edits but out of the box reference2i or major edits will completely fail. Additional tools might help to improve but that also counts for SOTA models which also will get even better. Additionally, flux2-Klein came out 9 months ago which is ancient in AI terms. Since Qwen Image 2.0 their models got gatekept by Alibaba, also Hidream image o1.5 edit is also not open source. A Z-image edit or krea2 edit are not on the horizon. Is there anything, any lab, that can give us hope in 2026? submitted by /u/Rheumi [link] [comments]

Source: r/StableDiffusion | 2026-09-17