Yesterday, I had the insane experience of joining the G7 summit in Evian and present our perspective on open innovation in AI to the G7+ world leaders.
With openness under pressure around the world, it is vital that we preserve a culture that makes open and responsible development the norm, not the exception
My full remarks below.
> Thank you, President Macron, for organizing this important conversation, and for bringing together this excellent group of people. I think I represent the youngest company in this room. I am Robin Rombach, co-founder and CEO of Black Forest Labs: a 90-person frontier AI lab, built on both sides of the Atlantic in Germany and the United States. We develop “world models”. These are visual AI models that understand and simulate our complex physical world.
Many of you have probably never heard of us. But if you’ve ever generated an AI image or AI video—I’m sure some of you have done so—you’ve probably encountered our research. Not far from here, at universities in Germany, our team pioneered and published many of the techniques that gave rise to visual generative AI. Our team has co-developed 3 of the top 5 most popular open generative AI models of all time, including Stable Diffusion, and the only open models as popular as DeepSeek.
We’ve talked a lot about language models today. They are remarkable. But language is a compressed, and ultimately limited, representation of the world. We are building models that learn from thousands of years of video, and can reason in complex visual environments—the rich, messy, complicated world we actually live in.
These are still early days, but this technology is going to transform every corner of the economy. For that reason, we believe that visual models, alongside language models, will soon be critical economic infrastructure.
That’s why we are passionately committed to open innovation. Sharing our technology openly means that businesses around the world can build their own AI systems, rather than renting them from a handful of companies. Open technology is vital for transparency, competition, and strategic independence in AI. A culture of open innovation made AI possible in the first place, including the transformer paper that gave birth to today’s language models, and we need to preserve that culture.
But we are fully aware that open innovation poses unique challenges, especially in image, video, and audio. Open AI models can be misused or modified to produce unlawful and deeply harmful content, and it can be difficult to withdraw these models once they're released.
Our commitment is to show that innovation in visual AI can be both open and responsible, not one or the other. This is partly a technical challenge, and we are making good progress. For example, our latest open models demonstrated over 10 times fewer vulnerabilities for sexual deepfakes and child abuse material than the open models released by other Big Tech firms.
But there is a role for governments too, from safety tools to evaluation standards to targeted regulation. For example, we have welcomed the leadership of the Trump Administration, as well as the European Union and the UK Government, in developing new legal strategies to combat sexual deepfakes.
It’s crucial that we strike the right balance. The future of our societies depends on getting this technology out into the world safely. But a climate of fear around open technology, or a focus on suppression over diffusion, will leave the world reliant on a handful of firms for critical infrastructure. We are ready to work with you all to make open and responsible innovation the norm, not the exception.
