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
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.

  • Related Posts

    ChiNext, Shenzhen’s Nasdaq, emerges as investor darling as start-up indexes smash records

    An overhaul of listing and trading rules has driven a 16-year-old board for start-ups on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange to an all-time high, and traders believe the listed companies’ above-average…

    Continue reading
    Chinese EV makers bet on in-house chips to make cars smarter and more autonomous

    Chinese electric vehicle (EV) makers and supply-chain vendors, from Tesla rivals Xpeng to Nio and lidar sensor producer Hesai Group, will display their technological advances on a new front –…

    Continue reading

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *