A mysterious new image generation model called "Red Panda" has taken the tech community by surprise, outperforming top models from Midjourney, Black Forest Labs, and OpenAI on the Artificial Analysis benchmark. This crowdsourced benchmark uses a ranking system similar to chess, where models are pitted against each other to generate images based on unique prompts. Users then vote on which image best reflects the prompt.

Red Panda has taken the top spot, beating the next-best model, Black Forest Labs' Flux1.1 Pro, by a significant 40 Elo points. What's more impressive is that Red Panda achieves this feat while generating images at an incredible speed, taking a median of just 7 seconds to produce an image - over 100 times faster than OpenAI's DALL-E 3.

The question on everyone's mind is: who is behind Red Panda? The model's creators remain unknown, but its impressive performance has sparked excitement in the AI community. With AI labs increasingly using community benchmarks to build anticipation ahead of major announcements, it's likely we'll hear more about Red Panda soon.