Black Forest Labs, a German AI image-generating startup, says it has raised $300 million at a $3.25 billion valuation, marking one of the largest investments in a Europe-based AI startup this year. Its funding comes as investment in the continent's AI sector overall, while still lagging far behind the U.S., has risen this year. New backers Salesforce Ventures 1 and Anjney Midha (AMP) co-led the financing, which included participation from a slew of other investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Temasek Holdings, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva and Figma Ventures. Founded in 2024, Black Forest has raised a total of $450 million in funding, per Crunchbase data. Its headquarters are in Freiburg, Germany, but it also has a lab in San Francisco. The company is known for its Flux foundation models of AI generation. It touts that its open models are 'the most popular image models' on Hugging Face, and that companies such as Adobe, Canva, Meta and Microsoft are 'building' on its models....
The Bendlerblock is an imposing neoclassical building near the center of Berlin'severe and symmetrical, with a red-tile roof. It once served as the headquarters of the Wehrmacht, and it's where officers who plotted to kill Hitler in 1944 were executed by firing squad. Now the complex houses Germany's defense ministry, which oversees the armed forces. I went to the Bendlerblock this past summer to meet with German military officials and see how they're responding to an aggressive Russia and a mercurial America. Two sergeants escorted me to the office of Lieutenant General Christian Freuding. At the time of our meeting, Freuding was in charge of the ministry's Ukraine unit, but he had just been named the next chief of the army, a role he assumed in October. His actual, ambivalent-sounding title is inspector of the army. Freuding is gaunt and soft-spoken, with something of an aristocratic bearing. He doesn't come from a long line of military officers, he told me, but his grandfather served in both world wars and was imprisoned by Allied forces in 1945....
In 24 days during the fall of 1946, a German novelist known as Hans Fallada produced a rare, and now especially timely, literary touchstone: a humane depiction of muted resistance. Every Man Dies Alone was based on a Gestapo file detailing the case of a Berlin couple who had run an illicit two-year postcard-writing campaign aimed at rebutting Hitler's propaganda. The novel was published in 1947'part of a postwar effort to start de-Nazifying German literature. Mere weeks before his book came out, Rudolf Ditzen (Fallada was a pen name) died at 53, weakened after a long struggle with alcoholism and morphine addiction. He'd faced criminal trouble too (he had shot and killed a friend in a botched suicide pact in adolescence, been twice convicted of embezzlement, and in 1944 been detained in a psychiatric hospital after pulling a gun on his wife). His literary credentials were also vexed. After winning recognition as a promising novelist in the early 1930s, Fallada was labeled an 'undesirable author' by the newly installed Nazi regime. Later, in a letter to a friend, he confessed to complicity with the government, admitting that, under threat from Hitler's chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, he'd altered a novel to have a character join the Nazi Party. Unsurprisingly, Fallada was preoccupied with gray areas in his final book....
Baumeister is the pioneer of cryogenic-electron tomography, which enables researchers to construct 3D images of large molecules and the insides of cells. For this work, he was awarded Hong Kong's Shaw Prize for life science and medicine this year. Now based at the iHuman Institute at the ShanghaiTech University in China, he continues to study the molecular machinery involved in type 2 diabetes. My colleagues and I had a big European Research Council grant for work on neurotoxic aggregates inside cells. But we have mandatory retirement in Germany. My contract was extended beyond the normal retirement age, and my colleagues in China knew that and said, 'Why not come to China and you can continue'' I also had offers from the United States to continue my research there, but they would have requested that I move there permanently. With ShanghaiTech University, I can come and go. I have been there six times this year, typically for two weeks at a time. There are things I had to get used to. For instance, human resources departments at universities are more powerful here. In my role as managing director of the institute in Munich, I always tried to make sure that administration serves the scientists and does not command them....
