Article
State of Open Models: Summer 2026 Observations
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AdinaY, multimodalart, irenesolaiman
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🤝 Open to Collab
Michael Hospedales
hospedales
·
AI & ML interests
Image Gen + Video Gen + Coding + Voice
Recent Activity
reacted to SeaWolf-AI's post with 🔥 10 days ago
🖼️ NO GPU, Only CPU : Z-Image model
Zero graphics cards. 46 seconds. Photoreal.
That laptop you're reading this on. No graphics card, right? It generates images.
No CUDA install. No Python environment. No driver changes. One binary, three model files. Done.
📊 Measured — GPU count used: zero
512×512 : 46.4 s
Korean prompt : 45.3 s (faster than English)
1024×1024 : 192.7 s
Peak RAM : 6.42 GB
GPUs used : 0
(Intel Xeon Gold 6526Y ×2, 48 threads, Q4_0, 3 steps)
⚡ From 244 seconds to 46 — 5.3×
Run it on defaults and it takes 244 s. Switch to 3 steps and it's 48.6 s. Add VAE tiling and it's 46.4 s.
The biggest culprit was the default. Z-Image Turbo is distilled to paint in few strokes, but the tool's default is 20. We were throwing away 5× for no reason. So were we, at first.
3 is the floor. Put 4 and 3 side by side and you cannot tell them apart. At 2 it collapses — water droplets and wood grain vanish, and the surface turns cloth-like.
🔗 Links
Model
https://huggingface.co/FINAL-Bench/POCKET-Zimage-CPU
Live demo Space (runs on CPU)
https://huggingface.co/spaces/FINAL-Bench/POCKET-Zimage-CPU
POCKET collection
https://huggingface.co/collections/FINAL-Bench/pocket-models-6a618ee5d23eafb7e185a5c6 liked a model 26 days ago
m-a-p/YuE2-3B liked a model about 1 month ago
nvidia/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-NVFP4Organizations
upvoted an article about 1 month ago