Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Thursday rolled out Nano Banana Pro, its latest image editing and generation tool, continuing the company’s momentum after launching its new Gemini artificial intelligence model earlier this week.
The product is built on Gemini 3 Pro, which was announced on Tuesday and contributed to record-breaking stock highs.
Alphabet’s stock was up 4% Thursday.
Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Gemini, told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa that the Nano Banana Pro’s capabilities expand beyond its original iteration, which launched in late August.
“It’s incredible at infographics. It can make slide decks. It can take up to 14 different images, or five different characters, and sort of keep that character consistency,” he said.
He added that internal users have experimented with the feature by inputting code snippets and even LinkedIn resumes to create infographics.
“I think this ability to visualize things that were previously maybe not something you would think of as a visual medium that tends to be one of the magic things people are finding with it,” Woodward said.
The original Nano Banana went viral on social media as users turned photos of themselves or their pets into hyperrealistic 3D figurines. Woodward wrote in an X post in September that the product helped add 13 million new users to the Gemini app in the span of four days.
Nano Banana Pro is currently available in the Gemini app, with limited free quotas, Google’s writing assistant, NotebookLM, as well as the company’s developer, enterprise and advertising products.
Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers will have access to the product in Google’s search features AI Mode.
The feature will later also roll out to Ultra subscribers first in Flow, Google’s AI filmmaking tool.
Google introduced another feature in the Gemini app that allows users to upload any image to find out if it was generated by Google AI.
Images generated on free Nano Banana accounts will have a watermark, but it will be removed for Google AI Ultra tier subscribers.
Google has been working to gain ground on OpenAI in the generative AI race, which ignited after the release of ChatGPT in 2022.
Last week, OpenAI announced two updates to its GPT-5 model to make it “warmer by default and more conversational” as well as ” more efficient and easier to understand in everyday use,” the company said.
ChatGPT currently tops the list of free apps on Apple’s App Store, with Gemini in the second spot.
The Gemini app currently has over 650 million monthly active users per month, and Gemini-powered AI Overviews has 2 billion monthly users, Google said in a release. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in October that ChatGPT had reached 800 million weekly active users.
Woodward said Google AI products have had growing demand, with many users signing up for Gemini’s subscription plan to have “higher limits with some of these advanced models.”
“We’re seeing high numbers of people coming to lots of these products,” he said. “That’s really the best problem to have, is there’s a lot of demand, and we’re trying to figure out actually how to serve it.”
The company is looking to continue scaling its AI offerings, Woodward said, highlighting Flow, Google’s AI filmmaking tool, and Genie, a “world building” model that is currently available as a limited research preview.
