alt Hacker NewsI'd say Google still hasn't caught up on the smaller model side at all, but we've all been (rightfully) wowed enough by Pro to ignore that for now.
Nano Banano Pro starts at 15 cents per image at <2k resolution, and is not strictly better than Seedream 4.0: yet the latter does 4K for 3 cents per image.
Add in the power of fine-tuning on their open weight models and I don't know if China actually needs to catch up.
I finetuned Qwen Image on 200 generations from Seedream 4.0 that were cleaned up with Nano Banana Pro, and got results that were as good and more reliable than either model could achieve otherwise.
FWIW, Qwen Z-Image is much better than Seedream and people (redditors) are saying its better than Nano Banana in their first trials. Its also 7B I think, and open.