China’s ByteDance, Alibaba unveil AI image tools to rival Google’s popular Nano Banana

TikTok parent ByteDance has unveiled its latest generative artificial intelligence image model that it says undercuts the popular Nano Banana image editor from Alphabet’s Google, a fresh development that comes as China and the US intensify their AI competition.

ByteDance’s new image model faced immediate competition from Alibaba Cloud, which also released its latest image-generation model, Qwen-Image-2.0, on Tuesday.

Chinese short-video giant ByteDance said its Seedream 5.0 image model ships with stronger reasoning capabilities, improved accuracy and enhanced edit control, helping it compete with Google’s Nano Banana at a lower cost, according to a post published on CapCut’s X account.

“Think Nano Banana Pro, but [much] cheaper,” it said in the post. ByteDance has made the image model available for beta testing on Jimeng and CapCut, its domestic and global AI content creation platforms.

Alibaba says its Qwen-Image-2.0, with a lightweight architecture for faster generation, performs better than Google’s Nano Banana Pro when rendering Chinese characters. Photo: Handout

The new Seedream model’s stronger reasoning ability enables it to better understand and follow human text prompts to generate the desired images, while enhanced edit controls – a feature that helped make Google’s Nano Banana Pro popular worldwide – allow users to retouch specific parts of an image without having to redo the entire work.

South China Morning Post