The Dawn of the One-Stop AI Model Shops
If you hang around machine-learning circles you’ll hear the phrase model zoo. It began as a tongue-in-cheek label for GitHub folders stuffed with different neural nets, but it has quietly become the North Star for creative-tech companies that want to keep every kind of generator under one roof. The last 18 months have turned that idea from hobbyist jargon into product strategy.
Adobe’s newly overhauled Firefly hub is the clearest proof. Unveiled at MAX London, the app now groups image, video, audio and vector generation in a single interface and lets you swap engines the way photographers swap lenses. Alongside Adobe’s own Image Model 4, 4 Ultra and a production-ready Video Model that outputs five-second 1080 p clips, the launcher already exposes Google Imagen 3, Google Veo 2, an OpenAI image model and Black Forest Labs Flux 1.1 Pro, with partners such as fal.ai, Runway and Luma queued up next.
Why would Adobe give prized screen real estate to someone else’s algorithms? Because client briefs seldom stick to one aesthetic or modality. A fashion house might need ultra-staged photorealism for the final campaign but lean on a looser look from an external model during concept sprints. Keeping that menu inside Creative Cloud means users never have to leave the Adobe walled garden.
Freepik made a similar calculation earlier this year. Its AI Suite now lets you flip a toggle between Imagen 3, Veo 2, Runway Gen-2, Pika, Luma, Kling and other engines, covering text-to-image, image-to-video and reference-guided motion—all inside the same prompt box.
Canva’s Magic Media plays the same hand for the prosumer crowd: describe a scene and Canva pipes your prompt to Runway under the hood, returning a clip or still that lands straight onto your design board.
Euryka AI pushes the model-marketplace idea even further for marketing teams. Inside one dashboard you can choose Flux, Ideogram, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion or Recraft for stills, then swap to Luma, Veo, Runway or Kling for motion, with GPT-4o, Gemini, Claude and Mistral handling copy. A Brand Hub module keeps colours, voice and usage rights consistent across Threads (chat), Docs, Sparks (templated content) and Imaginations (multimodal playground), and the platform touts itself as LLM-agnostic: customer data stays sandboxed and is not recycled to train partner models—catnip for agencies working under tight NDAs.
Shutterstock has leaned on the same logic for legal peace of mind. Its indemnified generator lets clients toggle between a DALL·E-powered model and Shutterstock’s own diffusion engine, while the company pledges to absorb any copyright blowback.
Zoom out to infrastructure and you see Amazon Bedrock applying the pattern at cloud scale: more than a hundred text, image, video and multimodal models—from Anthropic to Luma—sit behind one API and a marketplace dashboard, complete with fine-tuning, guardrails and billing in a single invoice.
The business logic is straightforward: creators crave flexibility, enterprises crave risk mitigation and vendors crave lock-in. By housing third-party models inside a trusted wrapper (and, in Adobe’s case, stamping every output with Content Credentials) platforms promise both variety and accountability. The downside is that gatekeepers decide which models get shelf space and on what terms, shaping the creative palette available to millions.
For now, though, the momentum is unmistakable. Adobe’s Firefly hub, Freepik’s AI Suite, Canva’s Magic Media, Euryka’s marketing-first workspace, Shutterstock’s indemnified generator and AWS Bedrock’s model bazaar all bet that the future of generative art isn’t a single breakthrough algorithm but a curated buffet of specialised engines—one-stop shops where creators mix and match AI the way musicians layer plug-ins.
Expect the zoos to keep adding new exhibits!
