Stability AI closed a $76M Series B led jointly by Universal Music, Warner Music, Sony Music, and EA, bringing total funding to $232M. It is the first AI company to secure direct equity investment from all three major record labels simultaneously — signaling that copyright holders are shifting from 'sue AI' to 'invest in AI.'
FLUX is Black Forest Labs' image-model family. The Stable Diffusion team launched it in August 2024 with a 12B rectified-flow transformer. Two years later it spans klein 4B ($0.014 and the only current Apache-2.0 model) / 9B, pro ($0.03), flex ($0.05), max ($0.07 with live web grounding), and open-weight 32B dev. FLUX 3 extends Self-Flow to video, synchronized audio, and robot actions. This guide covers the FLUX.1-to-FLUX 3 evolution, three-tier licensing, and model selection.
The Tool Gateway routes four tool categories — web search (Firecrawl), image generation (nine FAL models), TTS (OpenAI), and cloud browser (Browser Use) — through Nous infrastructure, replacing four signups with one OAuth. It's per-tool rather than all-or-nothing, and `use_gateway: true` overrides any direct key in your `.env` — the precedence rule people most often get wrong.
2026 Q1 saw a full-blown open-source model explosion: on the LLM front, GLM-5, Kimi K2.5, and Qwen3.5 caught up with closed-source models; Embedding and Reranker are dominated by Qwen3 and BGE; speech has Voxtral TTS and Whisper V3; image has FLUX.2; and video has Wan 2.2 rivaling Sora. This is the complete navigation map.