
The AI field was once considered dull and slow-moving, especially in terms of consumer technology advancements.
But everything changed with the surge in generative AI, sparked by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT. This breakthrough fueled excitement across the industry, tech companies of all sizes to dive into AI experimentation. As competition intensifies and the market grows saturated, the race is open for anyone to join.
And this time, a mysterious new image generation model, known as “red_panda,” is now outperforming those from Midjourney, Black Forest Labs, and OpenAI on the popular crowdsourced Artificial Analysis benchmark.
Not only that, because on the benchmark's dedicated web page for red_panda, it's suggested that the AI is also one of the better-performing models on the leaderboard in terms of its generation speed, as it takes the model a median of around 7 seconds to generate an image.
This makes it more than 100 times faster than OpenAI’s DALL·E 3.

As for how Artificial Analysis ranks models, it uses a community driven benchmark approach.
Crowdsourcing to create a score, for image models, Artificial Analysis selects two models at random and feeds them a unique prompt.
After that, it presents the prompt and the resulting images, and then let users choose which they think better reflects the prompt.
The benchmark uses Elo, a ranking system originally created to assess the skill levels of chess players, to evaluate and compare the performance of different models.
This red_panda leads with about 40 Elo points over its nearest competitor—Black Forest Labs’ Flux1.1 Pro—claiming the top spot on Artificial Analysis' text-to-image leaderboard.
What is red_panda?
See red_panda in the Artificial Analysis Image Arena. Link in the tweet below pic.twitter.com/0VGFYleZI0— Artificial Analysis (@ArtificialAnlys) October 27, 2024
While bias can happen here and there, and everywhere, and although the results the AI created may not reflect the preferences of the wider community of generative AI users, what's certain here is that, pretty much all Artificial Analysis’ voters are AI enthusiasts.
When the news broke, red_panda is relatively unknown, with the community has only the slightest idea of the entity behind it.