HiDream-I1 is an open-source image generation foundation model developed by HiDream.ai, an AI research lab founded in 2023 by Dr. Tao Mei, a former JD.com vice president and Microsoft Research scientist. The lab focuses on open-source image generation foundation models.
Released in April 2025, HiDream-I1 is a 17-billion-parameter Sparse Diffusion Transformer with a dynamic Mixture-of-Experts architecture. At release it achieved state-of-the-art generation quality among open-source models, with generation completing within seconds. The model is distributed under the permissive MIT license in Full, Dev, and Fast variants. Its successor, HiDream-O1-Image (May 2026, also MIT-licensed), is an 8-billion-parameter pixel-native unified transformer without a VAE that handles text-to-image generation, instruction-based editing, and subject-driven personalization at resolutions up to 2048x2048, scoring 0.90 on the GenEval benchmark.
Weights are freely downloadable from Hugging Face and ModelScope, with code on GitHub and integrations in ComfyUI and Hugging Face Diffusers. Hosted inference is available through third-party providers such as fal.ai, and a consumer web app is offered at vivago.ai. The company raised over CNY 500 million in April 2026 and was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.