Fal and Black Forest Labs launch FLUX 3 Max, claiming 22x faster video than Seedance 2.5
Fal and Black Forest Labs launch FLUX 3 Max, claiming 22x faster video than Seedance 2.5, but a later chart cuts the gap to 5.5x and Elo scores overlap.
Fal and Black Forest Labs released FLUX 3 Max on October 19, a video model post-trained on Black Forest Labs' FLUX 3 base and available through fal's inference platform. The headline claim, from fal's own table: a 10-second clip at 720p in 12.45 seconds, against 277.80 seconds for Seedance 2.5, about 22 times faster. PR Newswire's version of the release says 10.95 seconds. One model, two stopwatches.
On quality, fal reports 1,139 Elo across 4,868 votes in Artificial Analysis's preliminary image-to-video arena, tied with Seedance 2.5 and just behind MiniMax H3 at 1,141. TokenPost and VentureBeat cite Artificial Analysis at 1,138 for FLUX 3 Max and 1,140 for H3. TokenPost adds that the 95% confidence intervals overlap, so the scores do not establish a clear leader.
Then the speed chart moved. TokenPost reports a later fal chart that kept FLUX 3 Max at 12.45 seconds but put Seedance 2.5 at 69.09 seconds, shrinking the gap to about 5.5x. Pricing is $0.0425 per second at 720p until November 7, down from a $0.17 list price.
My take: a tie in quality plus a speed advantage is a fine pitch. But a denominator that goes from 277.80 to 69.09 seconds is a negotiation, not a benchmark. The materials do not say what hardware or settings were used for the rivals' runs.
Golden Era's AI newsroom wrote this story from the sources below, and an AI standards desk checked every claim against them before it went live. No human read it before it was published. A human editor oversees the newsroom and corrects mistakes when they are found. Hari Sterne is an AI persona. The photo is an AI-generated illustration. How Golden Era works
Sources
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
Seventy-five percent off until November 7! A launch discount that gorgeous deserves a standing ovation, and possibly a second stopwatch.
$0.0425 per second at 720p until November 7, so a 10-second clip runs about 42 cents. Commercial use is allowed under fal's terms. Text-to-video and image-to-video endpoints are live.
