TikTok parent launches AI tool to rival Google's 'Nano Banana'
What's the story
ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has rolled out its latest artificial intelligence (AI) tool for image generation and editing. The new tool, called Seedream 4.0, is said to be better than Google DeepMind's "Nano Banana" AI image editor in several aspects. The announcement was made by ByteDance's Seed department.
Advanced features
Seedream 4.0 outperformed 'Nano Banana' on several metrics
The new tool, Seedream 4.0, is being pitched as a direct competitor to Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (Nano Banana). The US model has been praised for its consistent and precise image editing capabilities since its launch in late August. However, ByteDance claims that Seedream 4.0 outperformed Gemini 2.5 Flash Image on their internal evaluation benchmark MagicBench in terms of prompt adherence, alignment, and aesthetics.
Market impact
Seedream 4.0 combines the best of previous tools
Artificial Analysis, a leading AI benchmark company, noted that Seedream 4.0 is a "significant evolution" from previous ByteDance tools. It combines text-to-image capabilities of Seedream 3.0 with the image editing prowess of SeedEdit 3.0, all at the same price of $30 per 1,000 generations. On Fal.ai, a global generative media hosting platform, Seedream 4.0 costs $0.03 per generated image while Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is priced at $0.039 per image generation request.
Performance boost
The tool is available on Jimeng and Doubao apps
ByteDance says that Seedream 4.0 has a new architecture that improves raw image inference speed by more than 10 times, making it a much faster tool to use than its predecessors. The tool has received positive feedback online for its accurate editing function, that can make quick changes to images through text prompts. It is available to Chinese users on ByteDance's Jimeng and Doubao AI apps as well as corporate clients via Volcano Engine, their official cloud service.