Since I think it's interesting to highlight the jagged intelligence, I have a simple word search puzzle [0] that Nano Banana Pro stills struggles to solve correctly. Gemini 3 Pro with Code Execution is able to one-shot the problem and find the positions of each word (this is super impressive! one year ago it wasn't possible), but Nano Banana Pro fails to highlight the words correctly.

Here's the output from two tests I ran:

1. Asking Nano Banana Pro to solve the word search puzzle directly [1].

2. Asking Nano Banana Pro to highlight each word on the grid, with the position of every word included as part of the prompt [2].

The fact that it gets 2 words correct demonstrates meaningful progress, and it seems like we're really close to having a model that can one-shot this problem soon.

There's actually a bit of nuance required to solve this puzzle correctly which an older Gemini model struggled to do without additional nudging. You have to convert the grid or word list to use matching casing (the grid uses uppercase, the word list uses lowercase), and you need to recognize that "soup mix" needs to have the space removed when doing the search.

[0] https://imgur.com/ekwfHrN

[1] https://imgur.com/1nybezU

[2] https://imgur.com/18mK5i5