Nano Banana.
Unless you’re deep in the weeds of AI models, those two words probably don’t belong together. But for several days, a mysterious new image model with that very name has been creating buzz among people who have gotten to try it — because it’s simply so good.
The model has been showing up on LMArena, a benchmarking website that crowdsources user feedback. The site has a feature where you can “battle” two randomly selected models, which is where the model “nano-banana” has been appearing. When it has appeared, people have been remarking on just how good it is.
There’s just one problem: we don’t know for certain who nano-banana belongs to.
Enthusiasts have been trying to sleuth its maker and, so far, the most popular answer is Google, partly because the company started teasing something image-related earlier this month.
Over the past week, posts have been popping up on Reddit and X from users who have been impressed by the model’s ability to generate images and edit them carefully when prompted.
Business Insider managed to get nano-banana to appear on LMArena, and we found it to be pretty great at bringing our prompts to life, even if it still struggled with spelling the odd word correctly.
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Google hasn’t yet laid claim to the model — at least not directly. A Google spokesperson did not respond to Business a request for comment from Business Insider on it. On Tuesday, Logan Kilpatrick, Google’s head of product for AI Studio, posted a banana emoji on X. Naina Raisinghani, a Google DeepMind product manager, also posted a picture similar to Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s banana-taped-to-wall piece from 2019.
The use of the word “nano” could suggest this is a model capable of running locally on a device (Google has in the past referred to its smaller models as “nano”). Coincidentally, Google is holding a big event for its new devices on Wednesday — will Jimmy Fallon reveal all?
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