China’s ByteDance, Alibaba unveil AI image tools to rival Google’s popular Nano Banana
The tech giants’ new image models lower the barrier for individual users or businesses to produce professional-looking images
Chinese short-video giant ByteDance said its Seedream 5.0 image model ships with stronger reasoning capabilities, improved accuracy and enhanced edit control, helping it compete with Google’s Nano Banana at a lower cost, according to a post published on CapCut’s X account.
“Think Nano Banana Pro, but [much] cheaper,” it said in the post. ByteDance has made the image model available for beta testing on Jimeng and CapCut, its domestic and global AI content creation platforms.
The new Seedream model’s stronger reasoning ability enables it to better understand and follow human text prompts to generate the desired images, while enhanced edit controls – a feature that helped make Google’s Nano Banana Pro popular worldwide – allow users to retouch specific parts of an image without having to redo the entire work.