PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Axel Sauer

Axel Sauer is a researcher whose work spans autonomous-driving vision and generative image synthesis. He studied for a PhD with Andreas Geiger in Tübingen's Autonomous Vision Group from 2020 to 2023, coauthored an urban-navigation paper in 2018, Projected GANs in 2021 and StyleGAN-T in 2023, and worked as a research scientist at Stability AI from 2023 to 2024 on fast image generation. In 2024, he coauthored Adversarial Diffusion Distillation and a rectified-flow transformer paper that received an ICML Best Paper award, and co-founded Black Forest Labs, whose launch included FLUX.1. As of October 2026, he is a co-founder and research scientist at Black Forest Labs and a managing director of BFL GmbH.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2018

    Autonomous driving in cities

    In 2018, he coauthors Conditional Affordance Learning for Driving in Urban Environments, which maps video into intermediate representations for navigating complex urban settings.

  2. 2020–2023

    PhD work and Projected GANs

    From 2020 to 2023, he studies for a PhD with Andreas Geiger in Tübingen's Autonomous Vision Group, focusing on scaling generative adversarial networks. In 2021, he coauthors Projected GANs, whose feature-space method matches previous best FID scores up to 40 times faster.

  3. 2023

    StyleGAN-T for text-to-image

    In 2023, he coauthors StyleGAN-T, a GAN for large-scale text-to-image synthesis that improves on previous GANs and distilled diffusion models in sample quality and speed.

  4. 2023–2024

    Fast image generation at Stability AI

    After his PhD, he works at Stability AI on fast image generation; Dealroom lists him as a research scientist there from 2023 to 2024.

  5. 2024

    Adversarial diffusion distillation

    At ECCV 2024, he coauthors Adversarial Diffusion Distillation, which samples foundational image models in one to four steps while maintaining high image quality.

  6. 2024

    A Best Paper at ICML

    In 2024, he coauthors Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis. The transformer uses separate weights for text and image modalities and lets information flow in both directions; ICML lists the paper as a Best Paper.

  7. August 2024

    Co-founding Black Forest Labs

    In August 2024, he co-founds Black Forest Labs, whose launch includes FLUX.1, a family of text-to-image models. The founding team includes researchers with experience at Stability AI.

  8. As of October 2026

    Research at Black Forest Labs

    As of October 2026, he is a co-founder and research scientist at Black Forest Labs; BFL GmbH lists him as a managing director.

Career

  1. Since 2024Black Forest LabsCo-founder, Research Scientist

Education

  1. 2023University of TübingenPhD

From the biography.

  1. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Axel Sauer. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  2. Universities (31%) and startups and other companies (25%) employ the largest shares of 2020–2026 entrantsIncludes Black Forest Labs. Among 819 people whose first recorded role started in 2020–2026 and who have a known current organization, 60% work in commercial sectors (25% at startups and other companies, 23% at frontier labs and 13% at big tech, with 9 in two), and 31% work at universities, compared with 66% for earlier entrants.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of Tübingen. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes University of Tübingen. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Axel Sauer yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Conditional Affordance Learning for Driving in Urban Environments axelsauer.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Projected GANs Converge Faster axelsauer.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Axel Sauer - Tübingen AI Center tuebingen.ai. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. StyleGAN-T: Unlocking the Power of GANs for Fast Large-Scale Text-to-Image Synthesis axelsauer.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Axel Sauer | Dealroom dealroom.co. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Adversarial Diffusion Distillation arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Axel Sauer axelsauer.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. ICML 2024 Awards icml.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Black Forest Labs: Image editing via AI prompt | heise online heise.de. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Black Forest Labs, nouvel acteur européen de l'IA générative, lance FLUX-1, une famille de modèles text-to-image actuia.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. Imprint (Impressum) | Black Forest Labs bfl.ai. Checked 21 October 2026.