Canva built its own image model. The interesting part is what it does before it draws
AspireAI community · Canva
*Canva built its own image model. The interesting part is what it does before it draws.*
Most image models generate pixels straight from a prompt. Canva Craft is two stages. A planning model writes the composition first: which elements appear, their spatial relationships, scale, hierarchy, and any text. A rendering model then paints that plan at up to 2K resolution across 30+ aspect ratios.
The training data is the other differentiator. Most image models train on photographs. Craft trains mostly on millions of Canva's own human-made templates, which teach layout, hierarchy and typography as relationships rather than as appearance. Canva's designers judged over 25,000 image pairs head-to-head.
Live now in Dream Lab and via the public API; MCP still coming. The DesignArena ranking is Canva's own claim.
https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/canva-craft/
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Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.