The news of January 19GoogleThis week, on January 15, the official website published an article about the recent “Nano Banana” Imagination Model。
In late July last year, the Google team was working on the Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model, Bug, running an evaluation and preparing for the first official online version, when the model, although technically coded, lacked a public name for the LMArena platform。
As a reference, LMArena is a public platform for the evaluation of the AI model, using an anonymous, participatory, two-to-one comparison to evaluate the large language model, and users can enter a hint (Note: Prompt) on the websiteAnd then the system makes two anonymous models respond,Users can vote for better-performing models,The model name will not be shown until after the vote.
Naina Raisinghani, the product manager, recalled:
- We dragged the code name to the last minute. At 2:30 in the morning, a PM sent me a message saying it had to be submitted immediately. I said, "Why don't we have something funny, like "Nano Banana?"。
And the other side replied, "Well, it doesn't seem to make any sense, but it is it."。
As to why the name “Nano Banana” had come to mind at the time, Naina Raisinghani explained that it actually came from her own nickname。Some friends would call her "Naina Banana.",And some people call her "Nano" because she's small,So she put two nicknames together.
Then, in early August last year, the Google team presented Nano Banana to LMArena, and the power of the model quickly shook the usersAnd most people think it's funnyAnd talk about the sound。
Later, when the brand name “Nano Banana” stood on its heel, most people knew only bananas, without knowing the technical code “Gemini 2.5 Flash Image”, the team simply went along with it: replace the running button in AI Studio with yellow, and add an expression to Gemini App’s “Generating Picture” button。