CogView3 is a text-to-image model from Zhipu AI and Tsinghua University, described in a March 2024 research paper and open-sourced on Hugging Face in September 2024. It is built around relay diffusion, a cascaded approach where a 3-billion-parameter base stage generates a low-resolution 512x512 image and a second stage adds noise back into that image before running a shorter super-resolution diffusion pass on top of it, rather than conditioning the second stage directly on the low-res output like older cascaded models did. Zhipu reports that CogView3 beats Stable Diffusion XL in human evaluations by a wide margin while needing only about half the inference time, and a distilled version matches that quality using roughly a tenth of SDXL’s inference steps. The model and code are released under Apache 2.0, and Zhipu followed it with CogView-3Plus, a larger diffusion transformer variant in the same family, plus a hosted version through the Zhipu API for developers who don’t want to run it themselves.