Google has taken credit for a viral new image editing model that’s been generating a buzz online.
“Nano Banana” is Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash. And it’s very good.
AI continues to take bites out of the existing software market.
It’s a bad day to be Adobe.
Google has said it’s behind a viral image editor that’s been generating a lot of online buzz. We wrote about it, Redditors raved about it, and now it’s here for everyone to try.
The company announced Tuesday that Google DeepMind created the model, and it’s integrating it into the Gemini app and website so that anyone can use it. While it was tested under the name “Nano Banana,” the model is actually named Gemini 2.5 Flash.
Google’s been testing the new model on LMArena, a public site that crowdsources anonymous feedback on AI model quality. It showed up as Nano Banana, but users were quick to guess that Google was behind it.
Google said Gemini 2.5 Flash’s particular strength is in keeping a person or animal’s likeness the same from image to image. Based on the feedback so far, Google claims that users prefer the new model over those from OpenAI and other rivals, based on its Elo score — a method for calculating the relative skill levels of generative models.
Business Insider has been testing the model for several days, and we’ve found it generally better than rival tools. It’s not perfect — it sometimes struggled to replicate faces when combining two different photos — but it’s especially strong at making small tweaks to existing pictures.
In the example below, we asked it to add glasses to the photo of this article’s author and to change the color of the T-shirt to red. While several models got the glasses and the color correct, Google’s was the only one to retain the stripe pattern on the T-shirt. It was also one of the sharper results.
That could pose a serious threat to existing editing tools, in particular Adobe’s suite of programs, such as Photoshop. Google told Business Insider it sees Gemini 2.5 Flash as a tool both for consumers and professionals. It’s also providing access to both paying and non-paying Gemini users.
Adobe also said on Tuesday that it would immediately make Google’s new model available in Adobe Firefly and Adobe Express. Asked why users might want to use Adobe’s tools instead of going to Google directly, Adobe told Business Insider its advantage is offering all of these models in one place.
Right now, that has done little to allay investor concerns. Adobe’s share price has dropped 35% in the past year, hit in part by analyst fears about AI’s impact on these traditional tools.
We’ll be testing out the new Gemini model in Google’s native app to see if the results are any different.
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