Stephen Batifol helps developers bring open AI models out of experimental sandboxes and into production. At Black Forest Labs, he works on the developer ecosystem for the FLUX image models, which power tools across Canva, Meta, and Microsoft.
He cares about the practical systems architecture required to run these models locally. His panel on localized open models broke down why a smaller model with a tight workflow harness often beats a massive frontier model. Before this, he built Wolt’s machine learning platform as their first MLOps engineer.
