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Nano Banana 2 Lite
- smallerfish 4mo agoIt seems to respond to edits much better than the current production image model, which often stubbornly locks on to prior iterations of the images.
- algoth1 4mo agoThey didnt include chatgpt in the comparison chart. That tells a lot
- minimaxir 4mo agoThat is fair to point out. For those who don't know, ChatGPT Image 2 has an absurd ELO of 1387; compared to the #2 model at 1273, it's over 100 points higher (https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text-to-image https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text-to-image). The tradeoff is latency, and ChatGPT Image 2 at High is...slow (~2 minutes at 1024x1024). In both cases it would have skewed the charts here to uselessness. I want to do a writeup on ChatGPT Image 2 but at this point I don't think people care about nuanced image generation anymore...even though ChatGPT Image 2 crushes all my existing tests.
- shmolyneaux 4mo agoI definitely appreciated your post about Nano Banana Pro. It's also a genuinely useful time-capsule for how these systems evolve and where they fall short. I've preferred the output of ChatGPT Image 2. I think a post would be very helpful for folks to see what they're missing.
- vunderba 4mo agoThat arena leaderboard has some questionable results. Anyone who's used these models would know that ranking HiDream above Krea2 is a pretty hot take. Many of these ELO comparative tests (ArtificialAnalysis is guilty as hell on this as well) also have other problems such as a considerable number of "amateur judges" tending to prioritize aesthetics over actual instruction-following given the prompt. Also (less a critique of Arena.AI necessarily), but the MAI models are so incredibly locked down (e.g. censored) as to be functionally useless. I have a sneaking suspicion its fallout from Tay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
- revolvingthrow 4mo agoWhile I have no experience with it personally (no interest in image gen) my aunt was raving about current chatgpt image model for "restoring" / working with old photos - sharpening, changing some small details like ill-fitting background. It takes her a bunch of prompting but eventually she gets things just right. In comparison, current gemini output (supposedly) tends to be subtly off, details aren’t quite right, proportions are subtly changed etc. This is purely about generating images with people in them, I don’t think she’s doing any logic puzzles with gotchas and specific alignments of differently colored blocks and whatnot
- HDBaseT 4mo agoChatGPT Image 2 is genuinely insane. I was surprised the internet didn't have a meltdown when it released.
- sokz 4mo agoChatGPT image is a lot more aesthetically coherent when I do a layman's test between Gemini and ChatGPT (both through their chat interface). It just breaks down in subsequent editing (around 3-4 editing prompts). That is to say Gemini also does the same, but I felt it degrades more gracefully in subsequent editing runs.
- pablonaj 4mo agoPlease do write about it, there are still definitely people interested. I have also have noticed that GPT Image 2 is very good and has a great cost/result ratio compared to other models, specially using the low version which can cost 0.01 and is usually good enough for many use cases. I completely replaced Nano Banana for most of my workflows because I'm using API and the cost adds up. I still haven't tried Nano Banana 2 Lite but the price may be hard to justify, although the speed bump sounds good.
- johny115 4mo agoand also left out Nano Banana Pro, which in my opinion is still better in many cases then NB2 ... even on the site arena.ai, it's still best at editing
- vunderba 4mo agoYeah given Google's order of progression NB NB Pro NB 2 A lot of us are still expecting Google to drop a Pro version of NB 2 but that hasn't happened yet...
- mikert89 4mo agogemini is so far behind. starting to wonder if their strategy is launching the low cost alternative to image/text models. last release was 3.5 flash
- ianhawes 4mo agoImagine saying Gemini is so far behind when Llama has unreleased max models from last year that are currently beat by quantized Qwen2.5 models.
- mikert89 4mo agoPeople inside deep mind are using Claude code
- computerex 4mo agoLlama was great for research and propelling the opensource community but they haven't been a serious competitor in a while. Whereas Google is one of the top 3 AI labs in America.
- maz1b 4mo agoWow, that's a pretty massive decrease in latency, which should unlock some use cases, but the linked web page doesn't exactly make it straightforward to understand the differences between the models. However, based off my personal experiences with general images models, Google in my opinion is the best for my workflows. Granted, I haven't tried far-east providers yet. What does everyone else think?
- minimaxir 4mo agoI received early access to test this model. (through work — Google still does not like me personally lol) It works as advertised here, and it does behave like a distilled Nano Banana 2 with respect to certain elements such as good text rendering, which Nano Banana 1 does much worse with. It is definitely not at the level of the base Nano Banana 2 of course particularly with highly-nuanced prompts. My main criticism is that you cannot programmatically force aspect ratios with NB2L but you can with NB2. That said, the price of $0.034/image is higher than expected since price is generally correlated with generation time, and it takes half the time to generate than a Nano Banana 1 image which costs $0.039/image. Google's assertion that you can directly replace NB1 pipelines with NB2L is fair. Yesterday, Google announced that the Gemini app will allow free image generations (https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/personal-intelligence-nano-banana-us-expansion/ https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/pe...) but did not specify which model would be used: I suspect it's the main motivation for Nano Banana 2 Lite.
- monegator 4mo agobut until this comes to edge gallery i won't care
- vunderba 4mo agoYou can set aspect ratios with NB2 Lite programmatically through Vertex [1]. I updated the program I use to help create all the images for GenAI Showdown, set the model ID to `gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image`, and was able to use aspect ratios like 16:9, 4:3, and others. [1] - https://cloud.google.com/developers/vertex-ai https://cloud.google.com/developers/vertex-ai
- echelon 4mo ago> Google still does not like me personally lol Please elaborate.
- Zambyte 4mo agoI read it as "Google is indifferent to me" rather than "Google specifically dislikes me", as a point of clarification that they didn't get access by being personally selected.
- timr 4mo agoIt's sort of amazing that Grok's image model beats Nano Banana on nearly every one of the metrics they chose to highlight.
- uejfiweun 4mo ago... does it? Are you seeing something I'm not seeing? Number one is that this just doesn't appear to be true (non-lite versions beat it across the board it seems), number two is that this specifically is a low-cost bulk model and not a SOTA frontier model, of course the benchmarks are lower.
- timr 4mo agoIt’s not a universal win, but grok outperforms on 2 of the metrics, and is close on a third. Image editing: banana 1308, grok 1329 Image generation: banana 1251, grok 1174 (grok loses, but is close) Cost: banana 3.4 cents, grok 2 cents Grok is a good image model, so it isn’t totally surprising, but it’s weird that they’d pick a set of metrics where they’re not the clear winner.
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- JeremyHerrman 4mo agoI was surprised with how well grok imagine performed when reviewing fast image generation. It balances quality, speed and cost really well with under $0.02 per 1K image within a few seconds.
- croes 4mo agoI guess less security boundaries have some advantages
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- Gingersnap123 4mo ago[dead]
- cush 4mo agoI'm way behind in imagegen - only using it occasionally for roleplaying tokens, goofing around, and random personal assets. To me, this is nuts. It's able to create images in like 2 seconds... before with chatgpt it would take 30s-1m for the same quality image. I don't get the negative comments here
- uejfiweun 4mo ago[dead]
- echelon 4mo agoDifferent use cases. People making images, where the image is the focal point, want to spend more per image. Where images are parts of reports or throwaways or demos, cheap is the better approach.
- Legend2440 4mo agoChatGPT detail is a lot better though. You can do stuff like complex 6-panel comics that Nano Banana can't match. Also a lot of the negative comments are from people who hate the very idea of AI art and want it to fail.
- WarmWash 4mo ago[dead]
- ramesh31 4mo agoIt's only half the full model price, $30/m output: https://cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platform/generative-ai/pricing https://cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platform/ge... Nano Banana is head and shoulders above the rest, but still too steep for personal use, and half off doesn't really mean much for enterprise if the results are worse. Hopefully this drives the rest to catch up at least.
- torginus 4mo agoThe first example of generating home interiors fills me with indescribable hatred. Recently real estate agents have taken to running every dilapidated unsellable apartment through these AI filters, and you have to scroll through a dozen of these Ikea-chic images of what the apartment presumably could look like, before you are allowed to see the horrors they are trying to peddle at insane prices.
- psygn89 4mo agoI think that should be illegal and misrepresenting. Lots of gray area with AI usage.
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- mvdtnz 4mo agoI'm not sure if you're being serious but it should be illegal because they're producing images that are often not physically possible. At least if an agent stages an apartment with real furniture they are doing something a tenant really could do. But these AI images tend to change the physical dimensions of a room, use images of furniture that don't make sense dimensionally, shift the "natural" light of the room in a way that the sun will never provide and sometimes even change the view through the windows of the room.
- phainopepla2 4mo agoI think their last sentence is a pretty clear indicator that they were not being serious.
- hbardigital 4mo agoThe speed is definitely impressive. I'm seeing under 5 seconds per image vs ~30 seconds for base NB2. I built an app for my kids that generates illustrated stories for them with them as the characters. I wanted to prioritize likeness while still stylizing the illustrations. I tested a bunch of models but none seem to come close to maintaining likeness when stylized. I find the others generate generic looking characters. I'm excited to incorporate this into the onboarding of my app since I want the users to experience the aha moment as soon as possible and waiting half a minute+ isn't ideal. I'll still be using the main NB2 for the actual illustrations as this lite version still has slight issues with nuance and consistency as others have pointed out.
- IncreasePosts 4mo agoI tried something like that but an error told me it couldn't do anything with children. Did that change?
- hbardigital 4mo agoHaven't experienced any errors related to children. Will get the random copyright error though.
- akoboldfrying 4mo agoPlot twist: His kids are in their forties, they just really like illustrated stories
- t1234s 4mo agoNB2 is an impressive tool. Camera File -> Heavy Changes in NB2 -> Final Tweaks in Photoshop -> Production Image
- esafak 4mo agoCan it do that with high fidelity to the source; e.g., denoise and restore?
- rafaelero 4mo agoExpensive and Google doesn't even have enough resources to decently deploy a model like that. Creating 10 images in parallel gives me RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED error, which is a painfully common error when using Google AI products.
- ignoramous 4mo ago> Google doesn't even have enough resources to decently deploy a model like that Probably not for free but tbf, Google did scale "AI Mode" globally to its billion+ users, with its Gemini 3 series. Pretty much broke my habit of searching the web with pplx & Chat.
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- JimsonYang 4mo agoWhats the use cases where cheaper and faster img models are key differentiators? I mean 3 cents compared to 6 cents doesnt seem like much in my mind-unless youre running a consumer saas
- earth_tattoo 4mo agoWhere is the pelican on bicycle test results?
- throwaway2027 4mo agoI loved Nano Banana Pro. Are there local alternatives yet? I heard about Qwen Image, Klein and recently Krea, any suggestions?
- vunderba 4mo agoKrea-2 is fantastic. If you can get around the restrictive license, output speed, and JSON prompting, Ideogram 4 probably comes the closest to SOTA models. See my profile for GenAI Showdown, where it's benched against other local and proprietary models. It actually scored above Gemini 2.5 (aka the original NB) which is pretty impressive.
- SV_BubbleTime 4mo agoPublic AI benchmarks are fucking stupid and can be completely ignored. Too gamed. However, your advice is right. KREA2 and Ideogram4. The latter being less commercially usable without what I would surely assume is a pain in the ass.
- vunderba 4mo agoTo a degree. There are plenty of well-known public tests that have been around since SD 1.5 that I'd have to say if companies are trying to "game" they’re failing pretty badly (wine glass filled to the brim, the inverted piano, the nine-pointed star, etc.)
- satvikpendem 4mo agoKrea is good. Check out r/StableDiffusion for more information on the open SOTA.
- bsder 4mo agoKrea2 has been remarkable for me so far, and, I suspect, the reason why Google kicked this out so suddenly.
- spider-mario 4mo agoHave you tried Z-Image (Turbo)?
- bredren 4mo agoHow do you get the ~real time prototype things shown in the "hands on" section of this page? gemini.g lets you add a canvas or use image gen, but it isn't clear to me how you stick in the "space lift" prompt and out comes what is demo'd
- charcircuit 4mo agoAt least from this page it looks like the images generated don't have a watermark on them. Hopefully there isn't an invisible one either.
- chatmasta 4mo agoThe article says that all images have SynthID watermark which is invisible mark indicating the image was AI generated. Why would you prefer otherwise? Seems like tragedy of the commons to release flood of unmarked AI generation images, among many other risks.
- charcircuit 4mo agoBecause people don't want random water marks being applied to their artwork. We've been using AI edited image and video using "filters" for years and the world hasn't ended. Time and time again these AI labs will fear monger how bad and dangerous these AI models are when in reality it is not the case and is just an excuse for them to exert power over others using their lead.
- chatmasta 4mo agoIf you can’t see the watermark (you called it “invisible”) then what’s the issue?
- charcircuit 4mo agoYou can see it depending on the image since it adds noise to the image.
- system2 4mo agoI've been testing for the last 2 hours and compared to GPT Image 2. The pricing for 1K resolution it costs $0.0342, takes 8 seconds (not 3 sec). Compared to the GPT Image 2 api ($0.0414 for the same res, responding in 35-45 seconds) I am pleased with its quality and pricing. The texts come garbled, it adds them to every image generated without the prompt, but negative prompts do work well to remove those. It tends to generate depressing-looking lighting, but if instructed, it overcomes it. Up close, faces also look pretty decent. I can still tell it is AI-generated, but to an untrained eye, it is nearly impossible to distinguish, especially for regular blog posts and ads.
- Havoc 4mo agoThat's nice but it's on google's broken AI studio thing. I can't use half the stuff on there because it requires a Google One account. Which I'm ineligible for because I'm on a workspace account. Can I switch? No, because Google One doesn't support own domains. So I need to run (AND PAY!) two accounts to have both a nice email address and Banana? Starting to think the correct number of paid google accounts here is zero.
- Andrex 4mo agoYeah I'm kinda in the same position. I pay for both One and Workspace for myself and not sure which to use for some of this stuff. I mostly default to my personal account since it has more context, but then bringing in stuff from the Workspace Drive/etc. is an extra few steps. And some stuff like Project Genie is just flat out unavailable on Workspace which seems weird to me.
- Havoc 4mo agoYeah I've already got a game plan - move the email to proton & sign up for claude to replace gemini search/chat...which I do use heavily. Works out more expensive but claude pro seems to include a little coding agent usage too. Already have one of those (GLM) but a bit of anthropic allowance would be nice The problem is extracting oneself from google is non-trivial. That must be a decade of emails...
- saint_yossarian 4mo agoProton has a pretty good importer for GMail/Calendar/Contacts. The downside is that their Android calendar app is shit (a rewrite should come later this year), and Android contact syncing doesn't exist (planned for 2027). Not sure how the situation looks on iOS, but AFAIK it's similar.
- Havoc 4mo agoGood to know re importer. Helpful. Their iOS mail app is fine though doesn’t do offline caching as well as Gmail
- raincole 4mo agoIt's really fast. But fast in a way that reminds me this joke: > Does this pill make me smater? > No, but it can make you dumb faster!
- spider-mario 4mo agoIt will probably remind French speakers of this: https://youtu.be/G7NB_RwtPx4?t=5m18s https://youtu.be/G7NB_RwtPx4?t=5m18s
- RugnirViking 4mo agono human wrote the prompts listed as example prompts here. "In a breathtaking display of surreal transformation, a cinematic moment of pure action unfolds against a textured, golden-brown canvas. From the right, a woman is seen in elegant profile, her lips a startling slash of red. Her quiet composure is violently contradicted by the explosive event taking place: her dark hair is erupting, bursting forth into a chaotic flock of black birds. These creatures are captured mid-flight, a dynamic swarm launching from her mind and sweeping across the frame to the left. The motion is palpable; you can almost hear the frantic beating of a hundred wings as they break free. Some birds are still tangled, emerging from the dark mass of her hair, while others are already soaring into the open space. This is not a gentle release, but a powerful, almost violent, act of creation or liberation. The camera captures this impossible metamorphosis head-on, focusing on the sheer force of the birds' exodus. This highly sophisticated image is a kinetic masterpiece, portraying an internal storm made external, a thought process so intense it literally takes flight in a beautiful, dark, and unstoppable flurry of action." really? anyone using for more than 10 or so tries these knows how to prompt them, and its not "The motion is palpable; you can almost hear the frantic beating of a hundred wings" "surreal transformation, cinematic action. Textured golden-brown canvas. A woman in profile, red lips. Dark hair erupting into a flock of black birds mid-flight. Explosive metamorphosis" is pretty much all the actual meaning captured here
- tauntz 4mo agoI'm trying it out to illustrate news articles and I'm getting this for 95% of my prompts. I guess I'm holding it wrong \(ツ)/¯ Unable to show the generated image. The model could not generate the image based on the prompt provided. You will not be charged for this request. Try rephrasing the prompt. If you think this was an error, [send feedback](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/troubleshooting https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/troubleshooting).
- nektro 4mo agoone of the most ethically barren products to come out of this era