Nano Banana 2 Lite

The 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.

I 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/pe...) but did not specify which model would be used: I suspect it's the main motivation for Nano Banana 2 Lite.

That'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.

The 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.

They didnt include chatgpt in the comparison chart. That tells a lot