Nano Banana Pro | Hacker News

meetpateltech

1245 points

ceroxylon

Google has been stomping around like Godzilla this week, and this is the first time I decided to link my card to their AI studio.

I had seen people saying that they gave up and went to another platform because it was "impossible to pay". I thought this was strange, but after trying to get a working API key for the past half hour, I see what they mean.

Everything is set up, I see a message that says "You're using Paid API key [NanoBanano] as part of [NanoBanano]. All requests sent in this session will be charged." Go to prompt, and I get a "permission denied" error.

There is no point in having impressive models if you make it a chore for me to -give you my money-

vunderba

2 days ago

Alright results are in! I've re-run all my editing based adherence related prompts through Nano Banana Pro. NB Pro managed to successfully pass SHRDLU, the M&M Van Halen test (as verified independently by Simon), and the Scorpio street test - all of which the original NB failed.

  Model results
  1. Nano Banana Pro: 10 / 12
  2. Seedream4: 9 / 12
  3. Nano Banana: 7 / 12
  4. Qwen Image Edit: 6 / 12

https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing

If you just want to see how NB and NB Pro compare against each other:

https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing?models=nb,nbp

minimaxir

2 days ago

I...worked on the detailed Nano Banana prompt engineering analysis for months (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917875)...and...Google just...Google released a new version.

Nano Banana Pro should work with my gemimg package (https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg) without pushing a new version by passing:

    g = GemImg(model="gemini-3-pro-image-preview")

I'll add the new output resolutions and other features ASAP. However, looking at the pricing (https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing#standard_1), I'm definitely not changing the default model to Pro as $0.13 per 1k/2k output will make it a tougher sell.

EDIT: Something interesting in the docs: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/image-generation#think...

> The model generates up to two interim images to test composition and logic. The last image within Thinking is also the final rendered image.

Maybe that's partially why the cost is higher: it's hard to tell if intermediate images are billed in addition to the output. However, this could cause an issue with the base gemimg and have it return an intermediate image instead of the final image depending on how the output is constructed, so will need to double-check.

simonw

2 days ago

This thing's ability to produce entire infographics from a short prompt is really impressive, especially since it can run extra Google searches first.

I tried this prompt:

  Infographic explaining how the Datasette open source project works

Here's the result: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/20/nano-banana-pro/#creat...

Bjorkbat

2 days ago

Something I find weird about AI image generation models is that even though they no longer produce weird "artifacts" that give away that the fact that it was AI generated, you can still recognize that it's AI due to stylistic choices.

Not all examples they gave were like this. The example they gave of the word "Typography" would have fooled me as human-made. The infographics stood out though. I would have immediately noticed that the String of Turtles infographic was AI generated because of the stylistic choices. Same for the guide on how to make chai. I would be "suspicious" of the example they gave of the weather forecast but wouldn't immediately flag at as AI generated.

Similar note, earlier I was able to tell if something was AI generated right off the bat by noticing that it had a "Deviant Art" quality to it. My immediate guess is that certain sources of training data are over-represented.

theoldgreybeard

2 days ago

The interesting tidbit here is SynthID. While a good first step, it doesn't solve the problem of AI generated content NOT having any kind of watermark. So we can prove that something WITH the ID is AI generated but we can't prove that something without one ISN'T AI generated.

Like it would be nice if all photo and video generated by the big players would have some kind of standardized identifier on them - but now you're left with the bajillion other "grey market" models that won't give a damn about that.

meetpateltech

2 days ago

Developer Blog: https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemini-3-pro-image...

DeepMind Page: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-image/pro/

Model Card: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Ge...

SynthID in Gemini: https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-image-verification-gemi...