Google’s Gemini 3 drives launch of Nano Banana Pro image-generator

Google has launched Nano Banana Pro, a new image‑editing and image‑generation tool built on Gemini 3 Pro, with the rollout confirmed on Thursday via a blog post.

The release comes just two days after Google introduced Gemini 3 Pro, which helped push Alphabet shares up 4% by Thursday morning. Google is pushing Nano Banana Pro directly into its AI lineup as demand for its models grows across search, enterprise products, and media tools.

Nano Banana Pro expands the original Nano Banana that dropped in August and went viral online. That early version let people turn their own photos into 3D‑style figures, and it brought in 13 million new Gemini app users in only four days, as Josh Woodward, Google’s VP of Labs and Gemini, wrote in September.

Josh said the new edition does much more than the one that spread across social media. He told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa that, “It’s incredible at infographics. It can make slide decks. It can take up to 14 different images, or five different characters, and sort of keep that character consistency.”

Josh also said internal staff have tested the tool with code snippets and LinkedIn resumes, which Nano Banana Pro then converted into clean infographics. He explained that “this ability to visualize things that were previously maybe not something you would think of as a visual medium” is what users are responding to.

Google moves Nano Banana Pro into Gemini, NotebookLM, and Search

Nano Banana Pro is already inside the Gemini app, with free users getting limited quotas. It is also built into NotebookLM, plus Google’s developer and enterprise tools, and Google Ads.

People who subscribe to Google AI Pro or Google AI Ultra can use it inside Google Search through AI Mode. Josh said the tool will appear next inside Flow, the company’s AI filmmaking system, with Ultra subscribers getting it first.

Google also added a detection feature inside the Gemini app. Anyone can upload an image and find out if Google AI produced it.

Free Nano Banana users will see watermarks on the images they generate, while Ultra subscribers will not have any watermark restrictions. The company is trying to widen what people can do inside Gemini, especially as competitive pressure builds.

Google’s Gemini growth continues as OpenAI updates GPT‑5

Google is still trying to gain ground on OpenAI, which kicked off the generative AI race back in 2022.

OpenAI pushed out two updates to GPT‑5 last week to make it “warmer by default and more conversational” and also “more efficient and easier to understand in everyday use.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is now the number‑one free app on Apple’s App Store, while Gemini sits in second place.

Google said the Gemini app has more than 650 million monthly users, and Gemini‑powered AI Overviews count 2 billion monthly users. In October, Sam Altman said ChatGPT hit 800 million weekly active users, showing the gap Google is trying to narrow.

Josh said more people are paying for Gemini subscriptions because they want “higher limits with some of these advanced models.” He also said, “We’re seeing high numbers of people coming to lots of these products. That’s really the best problem to have, is there’s a lot of demand, and we’re trying to figure out actually how to serve it.”

Google is working to expand everything under the Gemini umbrella.

That includes Flow, the video tool that uses AI to help build full scenes, and Genie, a world‑building system that is available only as a limited research preview.

Josh said both projects are part of Google’s plan to keep scaling its systems through 2025 as the fight for model dominance continues, while Donald Trump sits in the White House again, reshaping policy conditions for the entire tech sector.