By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Adobe said on Thursday it is adding image-generation artificial intelligence models from OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google to its Firefly app and bringing the app to mobile devices.
Adobe is the owner of multiple software programs such as Photoshop and Premiere that are widely used by creative professionals in the visual arts.
Since 2023, the San Jose, California-based company has been developing its own AI models in its Firefly service to generate images and video clips, promising its customers that they won’t face legal liability for using the images and video created by those models.
But last year, Adobe said it was open to also offering third-party models from ChatGPT creator OpenAI and others to its user base.
On Thursday, Adobe said that Firefly users will be able to generate images with OpenAI’s GPT image generation, Google Imagen 3, Google Veo 2 and Flux 1.1 Pro, in addition to a new version of its own proprietary Firefly image model. The company plans to offer models from partners including Pika, Ideogram, fal.ai, Luma and Runway in the coming months.
“We still have lots and lots of customers for whom taking stuff to production, they will only use Firefly because the commercial safety really matters to them,” Ely Greenfield, Adobe’s chief technology officer for digital media, told Reuters in an interview on Monday.
“But for other parts of the workflow, like ideation, they’re interested in experimenting with other models as well. So we’re making that choice available to them.”
Adobe shares were up 1.88% in midday trading after the announcement.
Adobe’s users will be able to generate content with third-party models in Firefly and pull it over into the company’s other apps such as Photoshop with a few taps or clicks. They will be able to pay for third-party models with the same system of credits that they use to pay for Adobe’s AI models, though Adobe declined to disclose how the revenue will be split between itself and third-party model providers.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
