Australian tech giant Canva has unveiled a homegrown AI image generator that independent tests say outranks Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI and ByteDance.
Friday’s launch comes two months after Australia’s most valuable private company was forced to postpone the launch of its AI tools, because of the high costs of having non-paying users use the tools on models such as OpenAI.
The company re-emerged with an image-generating tool on Friday, called Canva Craft, which is trained on Canva’s own design templates.
In an announcement from the company, Canva says an independent website that ranks AI image models puts Craft above Microsoft’s MAI-Image, Google’s Nano Banana and xAI’s Grok Imagine.
Those rankings say only three models – all from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI – are better.
“Building and owning these models gives Canva complete control over cost, quality, and speed, making it possible for us to deploy AI to the hundreds of millions of people who use our products every month,” a Canva spokesperson said in a statement.
“Craft is the first public model from Canva Research, which has tripled (staff numbers) in a year, with more models coming soon.”
Canva says Craft is built on millions of human-made posters, social posts, infographics and presentations, rather than photographs.
The independent image-generation assessor, Design Arena, puts Craft at No.1 for making images of people and for nature and landscapes. Craft ranks second, fourth and fifth respectively for abstracts, products, and marketing materials and 14th out of 87 for cartoons.
Canva heavily promoted the launch of its AI products in August but was forced to pull the pin over costs, and $10bn was wiped from the company’s valuation. Craft will be available to external developers and AI agents.