ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 2 HiDream releases since Apr 2025, most recently HiDream E1 on May 1, 2025. Highlights include HiDream-I1-Dev, HiDream E1. All 2 shipped with open weights. Every entry below has primary-source links and the episode segment where we covered it live, plus key numbers where we have them.
HiDream E1: open-weights image model with standout Ghibli style
HiDream released E1, an open-weights image editing/generation model (Apache 2.0-style licensing) noted for beautiful Ghibli-style outputs. It ranks #4 on the Artificial Analysis image arena leaderboard, sitting among top contenders like Google Imagen and ReCraft.
HiDream-I1-Dev: 17B MIT-licensed image model surpasses Flux 1.1 [pro]
HiDream released HiDream-I1-Dev, a 17B parameter open-weights image generation model under an MIT license. It became the new leading open-weights image generator, surpassing Flux 1.1 [pro] on quality benchmarks.
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