Top AI Product

Ideogram 4.0, released June 3, is Ideogram’s first open-weight text-to-image model — and it landed at #1 among all open-weight models on the DesignArena leaderboard the day it shipped. It’s a 9.3-billion-parameter Diffusion Transformer trained from scratch, not a fine-tune of someone else’s base.

## Built for design, not just pretty pictures

The headline feature is JSON prompting. Instead of describing a layout in a paragraph and hoping, you hand the model a spec sheet — layout, colors, exact text placement — and it follows it. That compositional control is what moves an image model from a generation toy toward a production tool for brand and design teams.

## The practical wins

Two things matter for real work: it generates at native 2K with no separate upscaling pass, and it outputs native alpha channels, so you get clean cutouts straight from inference without a background-removal step. It ranks #9 overall in the text-to-image arena and first in quality mode among open-weight models — behind only closed models from OpenAI and Google.