Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nano Banana Pro

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 718 posts

Re: Nano Banana Pro

#651

Post by lazide »

tracker1 wrote: post #646
harles wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a pretty uncharitable take. Given the scale of their recent launches and amount of compute to make them work, it seems incredibly smooth. Edge cases always arise, and all the company/teams can really do is be responsive - which is exactly why I see happening.

A company with a literal embedded payment processor, including subscription services for half of all mobile users can't manage to take payments for their own public facing services seems like a huge fucking failure to me. Especially for software developer and tech influencer focused markets.

It’s a sign that getting the product out took priority over getting paid for it.

Take that how you will.

Re: Nano Banana Pro

#652

Post by te_chris »

ukuina wrote: post #538
logankilpatrick wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, apologies for the bad first impression, the team is pushing super hard to make sure it is easy to access these models. - On permission issue, not sure I follow the flow that got you there, pls email me more details if you are able too and happy to debug: Lkilpatrick@google.com - On overall friction for billing: we are working on a new billing experience built right into AI Studio that will make it super ea…

Congrats on the move to Google! Please allow me to rant to someone who can actually do something about this. Vertex AI has been a nightmare to simply sign up, link a credit card, and start using Claude Sonnet (now available on Vertex AI). The sheer number of steps required for this (failed) user journey is dizzying: * AI Studio, get API key * AI Studio, link payment method: Auto-creates GCP property, which is nice *…

Then you actually use it! I dare someone to try and get Gemini live vertex app working.

Re: Nano Banana Pro

#653

Post by crazygringo »

dogleash wrote: post #443
crazygringo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? They're mostly different markets. Most people using Nano Banana Pro aren't using Antigravity. A cluster of launches reinforces the idea that Google is growing and leading in a bunch of areas. In other words, if it's having so many successes it feels like overload, that's an excellent narrative. It's not like it's going to prevent people from using the tools.

> A cluster of launches reinforces the idea that Google is growing and leading in a bunch of areas. What in the Gemini 3 powered astroturf bot is this? They probably just had an internal mandate to ship by end of year. > if it's having so many successes it feels like overload, that's an excellent narrative Yeah, if this is the best spin you've got I'm doubling down. Those teams were on the chopping block.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, if you knew anything, you'd know that AI product teams are the least likely to be on the chopping block right now.

Re: Nano Banana Pro

#654

Post by AJ007 »

risyachka wrote: post #502
asah wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then we'd complain about Google being a slow moving dinosaur. "Move fast and break things" cuts both ways ! (ex-Google tech lead, who took down the Google.com homepage... twice!)

We are talking here about the most basic things- nothing AI related. Basic billing. The fact that it is not working says a lot about the future of the product and company culture in general (obviously they are not product-oriented)

My first thought was this is the whole thing about managers at Google trying to get employees under other managers fired and their own reports promoted -- but it feels too similar to how fucked up all the account and billing stuff is at Microsoft. This is what happens when you try to "fix" something by layering on more complexity and exceptions.

From past experience, the advertising side of the business was very clear with accounts and billing. GCP was a whole other story. The entire thing was poorly designed, very confusing, a total mess. You really needed some justification to be using it over almost everything else (like some Google service which had to go through GCP.) It's kind of like an anti-sales team where you buy one thing because you have to and know you never want to touch anything from the brand ever again.

Re: Nano Banana Pro

#655

Post by elevatortrim »

logankilpatrick wrote: post #419
ceroxylon wrote: post #306

Google has been stomping around like Godzilla this week, and this is the first time I decided to link my card to their AI studio. I had seen people saying that they gave up and went to another platform because it was "impossible to pay". I thought this was strange, but after trying to get a working API key for the past half hour, I see what they mean. Everything is set up, I see a message that says "You're using Paid…

First off, apologies for the bad first impression, the team is pushing super hard to make sure it is easy to access these models. - On permission issue, not sure I follow the flow that got you there, pls email me more details if you are able too and happy to debug: Lkilpatrick@google.com - On overall friction for billing: we are working on a new billing experience built right into AI Studio that will make it super ea…

Any chance that this reflected to our company account instead of AI Studio?

We want to switch to Gemini from Claude (for agentic coding, chat UI, and any other employee-triggered scenarios) but the pricing model is a complete barrier: How do we pay for a monthly subscription with a capped price?

You launched Antigravity, which looks like an amazing product that could replace Claude Code, but do I know I will be able to pay for it in the same way I pay Claude, which is a simple pay per month subscription?

Re: Nano Banana Pro

#656

Post by mark_l_watson »

I used the new Nano Banana Pro just now, indirectly. I was brainstorming with Gemini 3 Thinking mode (now the default best thinking option on my iPadOS Gemini app) over a system design for an open source project that I hope to put a lot of effort into next year and then I asked for a detailed system level diagram.

The results were very good because the diagram reflected what I had specified during chat.

I probably sounded like an idiot when Gemini 3 was released: I have been a paid ‘AI practitioner’ since 1982, lived through multiple AI winters, but I wrote this week that Gemini 3 meets my personal expectations for AGI for the non-physical (digital) world.

Re: Nano Banana Pro

#657

Post by crazygringo »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #272
minimaxir wrote: post #149

I...worked on the detailed Nano Banana prompt engineering analysis for months ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917875 )...and...Google just...Google released a new version. Nano Banana Pro should work with my gemimg package ( https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg ) without pushing a new version by passing: g = GemImg(model="gemini-3-pro-image-preview") I'll add the new output resolutions and other features ASAP…

>> - Put a strawberry in the left eye socket. >>- Put a blackberry in the right eye socket. >> All five of the edits are implemented correctly This is a GREAT example of the (not so) subtle mistakes AI will make in image generation, or code creation, or your future knee surgery. The model placed the specified items in the eye sockets based on the viewers left/right; when we talk relative in this scenario we usually (…

> when we talk relative in this scenario we usually (always?) mean from the perspective of the target or "owner".

I dunno... I feel pretty confident 99% percent of people would do the same thing, and put the strawberry in the eye socket to our left, the viewer's.

You really have to be trained explicitly to put yourself in the subject's shoes, and very few people are. To me, the model is correctly following the instructions most people will mean.

And it's not even incorrect. "The left x" is linguistically ambiguous. If you say "the left flower", it's obviously the flower to our left. So when you say "the left eye socket", the eye socket to our left is a valid interpretation. If they had said their or its left eye socket, then it's more arguable that it must be from the subject's side. But that's not the case in this example.

Re: Nano Banana Pro

#658

Post by xnx »

boppo1 wrote: post #650
logankilpatrick wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, apologies for the bad first impression, the team is pushing super hard to make sure it is easy to access these models. - On permission issue, not sure I follow the flow that got you there, pls email me more details if you are able too and happy to debug: Lkilpatrick@google.com - On overall friction for billing: we are working on a new billing experience built right into AI Studio that will make it super ea…

Just make it a VSCode plugin, I don't want to install a new IDE (which is just VSCode anyway) to use your product. It might be better than claude and chatgpt5.1 but not better enough to justify me re-doing all my IDE configs.

There is a Gemini VSCode plugin: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Google.g...

Re: Nano Banana Pro

#659

Post by danielbln »

JLO64 wrote: post #481
simonw wrote: post #193

This thing's ability to produce entire infographics from a short prompt is really impressive, especially since it can run extra Google searches first. I tried this prompt: Infographic explaining how the Datasette open source project works Here's the result: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/20/nano-banana-pro/#creat...

This is legitimately game changing a feature in my SaaS where customers can generate event flyers. Up until now I had Nano Banana generate just a decorative border and had the actual text be rendered via Pillow controlled by an LLM. The result worked, but didn’t look good. That said, I wonder if text is only good in small chunks (less than a sentence) or if it can properly render full sentences.

It can render full sentences.

Re: Nano Banana Pro

#660

Post by infthi »

omnimus wrote: post #450
losvedir wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure Apple will roll something out in the coming years. Now that just anyone can easily AI themselves into a picture in front of the Eiffel tower, they'll want a feature that will let their users prove that they _really_ took that photo in front of the Eiffel tower (since to a lot of people sharing that you're on a Paris vacation is the point, more than the particular photo). I bet it will be called "Real Photos"…

this already exists. its called 35mm film camera.

Can't wait for a machine printing images on film by exposing it with a laser.
Post reply on HN