Nano Banana 2 Lite
Canonical version: Nano Banana 2 Lite.
Google DeepMind's distilled version of Nano Banana 2, published as Gemini Image Flash Lite. The trade is explicit: give up some quality on highly nuanced prompts, get a massive latency drop; roughly 2-5 seconds per image where base NB2 takes ~30. Pricing lands at about half the full model ($30/M output tokens).
What survived the distillation, per Max Woolf's early-access testing: the good text rendering that separates the NB2 family from Nano Banana 1, and generally behaving like a smaller NB2 rather than a different model. One commenter also found it responds better to iterative EDITS than the production model, which tends to lock onto prior versions of an image.
The speed changes which use cases are viable. Sub-5-second generation makes interactive flows practical: apps that generate illustrated stories on the fly, UI mockup iteration, anything conversational.
Lite is worth considering wherever speed beats polish: drafts, iterations, and batch experimentation before a final render on the full model.
References
- Model page: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-image/flash-lite/
- Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48735444
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