This article is part of our coverage of the latest in AI research.

Salesforce Research, in collaboration with multiple universities, has released BLIP3o-NEXT, a new open-source model that unifies text-to-image generation and image editing within a single, streamlined architecture. Despite its relatively small size of 3 billion parameters, BLIP3o-NEXT demonstrates strong performance, matching or outperforming other open models on several key benchmarks. 

Its intuitive design and open availability make it a promising foundation for developers looking to build custom generative AI applications or fine-tune models for specific use cases. As Ran Xu, Director of Applied AI Research at Salesforce and co-author of the paper, notes, the small model size and open-source assets make it an ideal starting point for customization. “If a startup has a specific use case or goal (such as generating layout of a design, generating planogram of a shelf) to be optimized, BLIP3o-NEXT provide a good framework to do RL to optimize the goal,” Xu told TechTalks.