Google appears to be finally moving its marketing muscle as it looks to stamp its authority in the AI race.
Google has created an X account for Nano Banana, its viral AI image generator. Users can simply tag the @NanoBanana account with their prompt, and the account responds with an image. Nano Banana is Google’s Gemini Flash 2.5 Image model, and has topped many image-generation benchmarks.
X users have been asking Nano Banana to generate their images, and it seems to be responding fairly quickly.
Nano Banana had first appeared as a model on LMArena, a platform where users do blind tests of outputs of two different AI models. Nano Banana quickly created plenty of buzz for its realistic image generation capabilities and its image editing features. Google began hinting that it was behind the model, with Google employees sharing images of a single banana emoji on X. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and other senior leaders too teased the launch of the model with banana references on X. Google finally unveiled Nano Banana as Gemini Flash 2.5 Image, and made it available through Gemini, Google Image Studio, and its API. But Google now seems to be referring to the model with the Nano Banana name that had originally made it famous, and has even created an X account to get even more people to use it.
Images have been a popular way for AI companies to go viral. Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion image generation model had thrust the company into mainstream limelight in 2023. Earlier this year, OpenAI’s image generation model went mega viral with the Ghibli trend, and the company saw its userbase expand massively because of that one feature. Elon Musk has been aggressively pushing Grok’s Imagine video-generation feature, hoping it would catch on among users. Google has now created an image generation model that seems to be much better than the competition, especially at editing images, and is making sure that the model gets the visibility it deserves.
And this seems to be a refreshing change in approach from Google. For years, Google has created high-quality products, but hasn’t always been creative or aggressive in taking them to the masses — Google, for instance, had invented the transformer architecture, but OpenAI beat it to the punch by using it and releasing it as ChatGPT. Google now seems determined to win the marketing battles as well, and seems to be pulling out all stops with mysterious posts from top leadership, catchy names, and accessibility to products through platforms like X. It remains to be seen if the approach works out, but it’s clear that Google is now prioritizing marketing as well as it looks to take the lead in the AI race.