Have you ever wondered why some artificial intelligences have the name they do? There’s a good chance you have, because some are completely unpronounceable and others just sound like a joke. This is the case of Nano Bananawhich owes its title to a late-night anecdote that the Google team has just revealed.
Just in case this AI doesn’t sound familiar to you, let me tell you that Nano Banana is a conversational image generator and editor, which is integrated into Gemini and DeepMind and which seeks to offer the ability to create visual elements both users and professionals and creatives. In other words: democratize technology and artificial intelligence.
When it was released just a few months ago, many wondered what the seemingly funny name could be about. This is compared to other tools such as Claude, Perplexity, Sustability IA, MidJourney or DALL·E, which have more technical and formal names.
Google wanted to clear everyone’s doubts with a publication on its Doogle DeepMind blog, where it revealed the origin of Nano Banana. «The answer is in a late night fighta couple of personal nicknames and accepting the unexpected,» said the Mountain View giant’s team specializing in artificial intelligence.
«That’s complete nonsense.»
First of all, the brand has commented that at the end of July of last year, its team of developers was working overtime to prepare the first version of the model, which already had its technical name, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image. The public codename for LMArena, which is a public platform designed to evaluate AI models, had not yet been defined.
Given that the models presented at LMArena are not definitive, but are refined as users test them, it was «crucial» to determine a code namewhich was postponed until the last minute, as commented by Naina Raisinghani, who is a product manager.
«At 2.30 in the morning, one of the account managers sent me a message saying we had to send it, and I said, ‘Well, how about something funny like Nano Banana’? And they said: ‘Yes, of course, that’s complete nonsense,'» added the person who came up with a variation of his own nickname.
«Some friends call me Naina Banana and others call me Nano, because I’m short, and I like computers. So I simply mixed my two nicknames,» Raisinghani explained, acknowledging that the invention «fitted because it was a Flash model.»
Once Nano Banana came out, users were «very impressed» and the project’s name generated «a broader debate.» «It was an early sign that he would have more success»is indicated in the document and, the truth is, they were not on the wrong path, because today it is one of the most used image generators in the world.
«We let ourselves be carried away by nonsense»
With the launch of Nano Banana, the Google team discovered that the name was one of the elements that caught the most attention of potential users, so they decided to keep it, although the official technical name remained Gemini 2.5 Flash Image.
However, since it was made public, the tool has also gone through a small transformation process, since the Nano Banana launch button has been changed, a banana emoji has been added to the trigger Create image from the Gemini app and even the most advanced version, Nano banana Pro, has been launched.
«We let ourselves be carried away by nonsense. We have adopted the banana emoji as one of us,» Naina concluded, assuring that Google is happy that people «find the attractiveness in the model.»