Google often has good products in his portfolio, but it hasn’t always been good at marketing them to the general public. The company, however, now seems to be making a conscious effort to change that.
Top Google executives are teasing the launch of “nano-banana”, the image editing model that’s been attracting plenty of buzz over the last couple of weeks. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis shared a picture on X, saying “strange object spotted under the microscope over the weekend in the lab…”. The shot, which looked like a typical under-the-microscope picture, had a fully-formed banana in the corner.
Other Google voices on X too have been amplifying the nano banana hype. Patrick Loeber, who works with developers at Google DeepMind, also referenced the model. “happy monday, wishing everyone a very a-peel-ing week ahead!” he posted on X, hinting that the model would be released this week.
Another Google PM shared a “banana signal” post.
Google’s Logan Kilpatrick, who leads product for Google AI Studio, posted “banana mode” using an emoji. He’d previously posted a single banana on X, which had led people to believe that it was Google which was behind the mysterious image editing model on LMArena which was wowing people with its abilities.
The nano banana had quietly appeared on LMArena a few days ago. Users had been impressed with its prompt adherence and its speed. Nano banana had both text to image and image to image capabilities, and was especially adept at preserving consistent characters or products. No company had taken credit for the model for a while, which had led to some speculation over who really had created it.
It now appears that Google was indeed behind the model, and is now drumming up the hype around it on X. It’s something that might be necessary in the AI space — OpenAI does this expertly with their own models, and smaller startups do it too. There are so many AI products out there that people have to be incentivized to try newer ones out, and hyping them up before release seems to be an effective way to do so. Hype-posting on X likely doesn’t come naturally to someone like Demis Hassabis, who has a knighthood and a Nobel Prize, but he seems to be doing it anyway to make sure that the products that his teams are building see widespread adoption. And this newfound hunger at Google will likely stand the company in good stead as it looks to stamp its authority in the AI space.