These Bananas Might Confirm Google Is Behind a Viral New AI Model

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.

Related stories

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?

Have something to share? Contact this reporter via email at hlangley@businessinsider.com or Signal at 628-228-1836. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.