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google announced Thursday its latest image editing and generation tool, Nano Banana Pro, continuing the company’s momentum after announcing its new Gemini artificial intelligence model earlier this week.
The product builds on the Gemini 3 Pro, which was announced on Tuesday and helped drive the stock to record highs.
Alphabet stock rose 4% on Thursday.
Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Gemini, told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa that Nano Banana Pro’s capabilities have been expanded beyond the original version, which launched in late August.
“It’s amazing for infographics. You can create a slide deck. You can bring in up to 14 different images or five different text and keep the text consistent,” he said.
He added that internal users are experimenting with the feature by entering code snippets and are also creating infographics on LinkedIn resumes.
“I think this ability to visualize things that were probably unthinkable before is a visual medium that tends to be one of the magics that people are discovering with it,” Woodward said.
The original Nano Banana went viral on social media as users turned photos of themselves or their pets into surreal 3D figures. In a September post to X, Woodward wrote that the product added 13 million new users to the Gemini app in four days.
Nano Banana Pro is currently available in Gemini apps with limited free quota, Google’s Writing Assistant, NotebookLM, and the company’s developer, enterprise, and advertising products.
Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can access products in Google’s search AI mode.
The feature will later roll out to Ultra subscribers, first in Flow, Google’s AI filmmaking tool.
Google has introduced another feature in its Gemini app that allows users to upload any image and check if it was generated by Google AI.
Images generated with a free Nano Banana account will have a watermark, but will be removed if you are a Google AI Ultra tier subscriber.
Google has been working to establish OpenAI’s place in the generative AI race, which started after the release of ChatGPT in 2022.
OpenAI last week announced two updates to make the GPT-5 model “warmer and more conversational by default” and “more efficient and easier to understand in everyday use,” the company said.
ChatGPT is currently at the top of the list of free apps on Apple’s App Store, with Gemini in second place.
The Gemini app currently has more than 650 million monthly active users, and AI Overs powered by Gemini has 2 billion monthly users, according to a Google release. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced in October that ChatGPT had reached 800 million weekly active users.
Woodward said demand for Google’s AI products is increasing, with many users signing up for Gemini subscription plans that require “higher limits in some advanced models.”
“We see a lot of people accessing a lot of these products,” he said. “That’s really the biggest issue. There’s a lot of demand, so we’re really trying to figure out how to respond.”
Woodward said the company is looking to continue expanding its AI offerings, highlighting Flow, Google’s AI filmmaking tool, and Genie, a “worldbuilding” model currently available in limited research preview.
