Nepotism is the FLUX.1 checkpoint family I train on my own GPUs and publish as BobsBlazed, and it is the model people know me by. Twelve versions have shipped so far. Each one comes with release notes, sample images, and a fixed evaluation suite that I render before and after every change to the weights.
Trained and shipped like software
The numbers behind version XII sound like an achievement: an 8.5-million-image training pool, more than 124 epochs, and more than 2.1 million logged steps. None of them is why the model got better. Quality improved when I cut the data harder. Near duplicates came out, tangled hands came out, and so did anything I would not want the model to produce, because a checkpoint learns whatever you leave in. The full method, from captioning through the pinned evaluation suite, is written up in the training essay.
Shipping it like software is most of why strangers kept building on it. Every release states what changed, what improved, and what broke for prompts people already relied on. Versions run I through XII in Roman numerals so the history reads at a glance, and each dataset snapshot is tagged to the release that used it, so a bug report against an old version gets a real answer.
Where the family lives
The home is Civitai, under BobsBlazed, with mirrors on SeaArt, Tungsten, and PromptHero that reach people the home platform never would. Across those platforms the family has passed 35,000 downloads, and the Civitai counter alone reads 18,900+ as I write this. NepotismFUX, a merge of the dev and schnell lines, ships alongside the main releases for people who want the speed without losing the look.
Both pieces are in the studio at full size, with the settings read straight from the files.
What it led to
I taught myself the machine learning stack to finetune models of my own, and Nepotism is where that landed. The model brought invitations I did not plan for, including a speaker slot at the Symposium on Visual GenAI in Shenzhen in October 2024. The daily loop of training and evaluating it is also the reason Bobs Studio exists.
Nepotism is personal work, and it is not a Tenos product. The venture shipped its own 12B finetune under its own name, and I keep the two separate.