Google’s Nano Banana had crushed the competition when it was released just over two weeks ago, but the model has already been seemingly upstaged.
Bytedancec’s Seedream 4.0, the new image model from the company behind TikTok, has gone past Google’s Nano Banana model on Artificial Analysis’ image generation and image editing leaderboards. “Seedream 4.0 is the new leading image model across both the Artificial Analysis Text to Image and Image Editing Arena, surpassing Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash (Nano-Banana), across both!” Artificial Analysis said on X.
On the Text to Image leaderboard, Seedream 4.0 has an ELO of 1,222, compared to the ELO of 1,174 managed by Imagen 4 Preview. Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash, or Nano Banana, has ELO of 1,168.
On the Image Editing leaderboard, thought to be Nano Banana’s strongest suit, Seedance 4.0 leads with an ELO of 1,205, while Nano Banana is slightly behind with an ELO is 1,201.
Artificial Analysis’ leaderboards are computed by giving users the image generations from two different models with the same prompt. Users aren’t told which output is from which model, and must choose which image they think is a better result for the prompt. This allows for the creation of leaderboards based on which models were preferred by users in blind tests.
Seedream 4.0 has the same pricing as Seedream and SeedEdit 3.0 at $30 per 1k generations, and is currently available on FAL, Replicate and other inference services. Nano Banana has the same pricing of $30 per 1000 image generations.
Seedream 4.0 is yet another example of how good Chinese labs have gotten at creating AI models in the recent past. Google’s Nano Banana was the biggest AI release of the last month, and was significantly ahead of competition in its abilities which were reflected in the jump in its benchmark scores. But just two weeks after its release, it’s been upstaged by a Chinese model. Bytedance is the company behind TikTok, and is no slouch in AI — not only does TikTok have some of the most sophisticated AI recommendation algorithms, but Bytedance has released several popular AI models. But to dislodge Google from the top of a leaderboard might be one of its biggest accomplishments yet — it shows that China isn’t six months behind the US as previously believed, but is now matching it step for step.