
← Air Street Press27 jul · 7 min
Black Forest Labs FLUX 3: from video generation to robot control
<p><em>Description:</em><br>Black Forest Labs has launched FLUX 3, a multimodal foundation model that learns jointly from images, video and audio within a single architecture, and mimic robotics has released FLUX-mimic, a video-action model built on that backbone and being tested on real assembly work in Audi's Production Lab. Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital, an investor in Black Forest Labs, reads his Air Street Press essay on why a model trained to predict how scenes evolve turns out to be a usable robot controller. Covers the FLUX 3 preference results against Runway Gen-4.5, Grok Imagine Video, Kling v3 Pro, Seedance 2.0 and Gemini Omni Flash; how a lightweight action decoder reads the video prediction path without ever generating video; the frozen-backbone ablation against π0.5; the 101-millisecond system reaction time on a single RTX 5090; and what Air Street's own robotics deal flow says about where the constraint really sits.</p><p><em>Chapters (estimated at ~150 wpm, slide proportionally against final audio):</em></p><ul><li>0:00 A robot arm in Audi's Production Lab</li><li>0:40 What Black Forest Labs and mimic released</li><li>1:20 Early access and open weights</li><li>1:50 The preference-test results</li><li>2:40 What a model must represent to predict video</li><li>3:30 Reading actions off the video path</li><li>4:20 The frozen-backbone ablation</li><li>5:00 101 milliseconds, and the Audi tasks</li><li>5:50 What we see in robotics deal flow</li><li>6:30 The road to physical intelligence</li></ul><p><em>Links:</em> <a href="https://bfl.ai/blog/flux-3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">FLUX 3</a> · <a href="https://bfl.ai/blog/flux-3-mimic" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">FLUX-mimic (BFL)</a> · <a href="https://www.mimicrobotics.com/blog/introducing-flux-mimic" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">FLUX-mimic (mimic)</a> · <a href="https://press.airstreet.com/p/odyssey-series-b" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">Odyssey Series B</a> · <a href="https://press.airstreet.com/p/black-forest-labs-300-million" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">BFL Series B</a> ·</p>