"Compatible" is one thing - "built for" is a different beast. The difference can be like that between Images 1.0 and Images 2.0 - the sheer leap in compositional capabilities was staggering.

"Edit model" is a part of it, yes. So is style transfer. But less as an endpoint and more of a subset of what advanced I2I enables.

"Re-train to understand your brand" is a fine marketing pitch, but in practical terms, it's hard to justify burning a LoRA for most uses. Enthusiasts absolutely do it, but enthusiasts are built different. Robust I2I can accomplish a lot of the same, but with a workflow that's closer to "drag and drop your references" than to "try to get a LoRA to do what you wanted it to do on a very slim set of images".

Modern LoRA pipelines are getting closer to "reliable" and "braindead simple", but you can't escape the "wait N hours for the GPUs to churn" of fine tune no matter what you do. And iteration time kills - a lot of the value of AI in workflows is that it does what it does fast and allows you to iterate at speed.

You can think of "LoRA vs I2I" as of an image twin of "SFT vs in-context learning" of LLM land. Both are useful, neither substitutes for the other fully, but there's a reason why most reach for the latter way before they reach for the former.

I like the T2I from what I've seen, mind. Perhaps more than Images 2.0 or even NB2. I just think that focusing solely on T2I to the exclusion of advanced editing and composition capabilities is a very 2024 thing.

"it's hard to justify burning a LoRA for most uses" -> Not really, it's literally cheaper on Krea than using ChatGPT Images; NBP and GPT-Images 2.0 are quite expensive, you'd be surprised. LoRAs are one of our most stickiest features (this doesn't mean they are intuitive; this just means that customers who use it, suddenly are retained way more because of how much better their images become). But yeah, anything out there doesn't offer a nice training UIs like Krea where you can just drag-and-drop a moodboard and get a LoRA in a few minutes. It literally takes only a few minutes on Krea; definitely not "N hours for GPUs to churn".

Learn more here: https://www.krea.ai/blog/krea-2-lora-training.