ByteDance unveils new AI image model to rival Google DeepMind’s ‘Nano Banana’

TikTok-owner ByteDance has launched its latest image generation artificial intelligence tool Seedream 4.0, which it said surpasses Google DeepMind’s viral “Nano Banana” AI image editor across several key indicators.

ByteDance’s Seed department, which oversees the tech unicorn’s AI development efforts, said on Tuesday that Seedream 4.0 had strong image editing capabilities, putting it in direct competition with Nano Banana, officially known as Gemini 2.5 Flash Image.

The US model has received wide acclaim since its release in late August for the consistency and accuracy of its image editing abilities, which have been a challenge for AI image generators until now.

ByteDance claims that Seedream 4.0 beat Gemini 2.5 Flash Image for image generation and editing on its internal evaluation benchmark MagicBench, with stronger performance in prompt adherence, alignment and aesthetics.

However, these results were not published as part of an official technical report.

According to Artificial Analysis, a leading AI benchmark firm, Seedream 4.0 represented a “significant evolution” from previous ByteDance tools because it combined the text-to-image capabilities of Seedream 3.0 with the image editing capabilities of SeedEdit 3.0, while still being priced the same as the former at US$30 per 1,000 generations.