Nous Research co-founders Jeffrey Quesnelle (@theemozilla) and Karan Malhotra (@karan4d) opened FLUX 3 Preview to paid Nous Portal subscribers through Hermes Agent on Thursday, the lab said in a July 30th post on X. Nous says access will be free for those subscribers for 48 hours.
https://x.com/nousresearch/status/2082911477904654741?s=46 The release gives Nous a temporary distribution role for Black Forest Labs' FLUX 3, a multimodal foundation model trained across video, images and audio. Black Forest Labs announced FLUX 3 early access on July 23rd, describing a system that can generate images and videos with native audio from text, image or video inputs. Its video model produces clips up to 20 seconds in one generation, according to Black Forest Labs.
Nous is pairing the preview with a short-film contest. Entrants must tag Nous Research and Black Forest Labs by 7 p.m. PT on August 1st. Nous said it will select three winners, with first place receiving one year of free FLUX 3 access.
A model preview becomes a Portal promotion
The structure turns Black Forest Labs' model into an acquisition and retention offer for Nous Portal, the subscription layer that powers Hermes Agent. Portal combines model access, hosted tools and cloud agent hosting under one account. Its current paid plans start at $20 per month for Plus, followed by Super at $100 and Ultra at $200. Each tier includes monthly credits, access to hundreds of models, hosted tools and higher rate limits.
Hermes Agent runs through a desktop app, the terminal, cloud infrastructure and messaging services. Nous presents Portal as the preferred billing and authentication layer for the agent, replacing separate accounts and API credentials for model providers, web search, image generation and browser tools. FLUX 3 gives that bundle a time-limited capability that users cannot access through Hermes' normal image-generation menu, which currently lists earlier FLUX models and competing image systems.
That distribution strategy matters for Nous because Hermes is designed to remain model-agnostic. Users can connect providers including OpenAI, Anthropic and OpenRouter, reducing the need to buy Nous' own subscription. Exclusive or early partner models give Nous a reason to pull those users into Portal, where their model and tool spending runs through its billing layer.
Quesnelle, Nous' co-founder and CTO, came to the lab from computer science and security research. His published work includes YaRN, a method for extending language-model context windows, and DeMo, an optimization method co-authored with Diederik Kingma. Malhotra, Nous' co-founder and head of behavior, has worked on the Hermes model family and Nous' World Sim project. They founded Nous with Ryan Teknium and Shivani Mitra (@shivani_3000), who says she built the lab's initial team, business plan and brand as its founding CEO and president.
The promotion also arrives as Nous is trying to finance a larger push around Hermes. TechCrunch reported on July 13th that Nous was finalizing a round of at least $75 million led by Robot Ventures, with Union Square Ventures participating, at a $1.5 billion valuation. The report said Nous had previously raised $70 million.
FLUX moves beyond image generation
Black Forest Labs was founded in 2024 by researchers whose work contributed to latent diffusion and Stable Diffusion. The lab raised a $300 million Series B in December 2025 at a $3.25 billion post-money valuation, co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha's AMP.
FLUX 3 broadens its product line beyond the image-generation focus of FLUX 1 and FLUX 2. Black Forest Labs says the unified model can generate images and video with audio, maintain characters across multi-shot sequences and produce multilingual dialogue. The lab has also adapted an early version into a video-action model with mimic robotics, using FLUX 3 representations to control robots.
For the next 48 hours, Nous is selling the creative side of that technical expansion: make a film inside Hermes, publish the result and compete for continued access. The contest supplies Black Forest Labs with public demonstrations while giving Nous a concrete test of whether a partner model can convert attention into Portal subscriptions.