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Seedream 4.0: Nano Banana Killer?

AI image wars continue, with bonus rumors of an upcoming OpenAI image update.

Daniel Nest's avatar
Daniel Nest
Sep 11, 2025
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TL;DR

ByteDance’s Seedream 4.0 gives Nano Banana a run for its money with top-tier image generation and editing.

What is it?

Just when you thought we were done, folks!

It’s only been two weeks since Google’s Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) “killed” Photoshop, but we already have a shiny new kid on the block: Seedream 4.0.

The latest model from ByteDance goes toe-to-toe with Nano Banana on image editing tasks, while also being on par with GPT image generation at making new images.

MagicBench: Multi-Dimensional Evaluation In comparison with other models, Seedream 4.0 performed well across core dimensions including prompt adherence, alignment, and aesthetics. Text-to-Image Radar Chart  Achieved high scores in text-to-image tasks for prompt following, aesthetics, and text-rendering. Single-Image Editing Radar Chart  Achieved a good balance between prompt following and alignment with the source image in single-image editing tasks. Also reached the first place in the internal Elo evaluation.
Source: ByteDance

This video has plenty of helpful side-by-side image editing tests:

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