The person who named Google’s Nano Banana AI image-generation model has a pretty good idea of why the world found it so appealing.
“One reason we were successful is the model was available everywhere from day one — it didn’t matter what country you were in, or whether you were a developer or a consumer, you had it on the same day,” Product Manager Naina Raisinghani recently told Keyword, Google’s official blog. “And then culturally relevant prompts went viral everywhere, like the popular figurine trend, which started in Thailand, or the saree trend in India.”
Google revealed that Raisinghani was the originator of the model’s zany codename, a last-minute decision.
“So at 2:30 a.m., one of the PMs messaged me saying we needed to submit it, and I said, ‘OK, how about something funny like ‘Nano Banana’?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, sure. That’s completely nonsensical,'” Raisinghani told Keyword.
The search giant previously had a sweet tooth when it publicly named versions of its Android operating system after a dessert, a tradition it ended in 2019 when it reverted to the less indulgent practice of going with a numeral.
Nano Banana isn’t the result of a health kick, though. Raisinghani said it is a play on her own nickname, “Naina Banana.”
“Some of my friends call me Naina Banana, and others call me Nano because I’m short and I like computers,” she said. “So I just smushed my two nicknames together. And it fit because it was a Flash model.”
AI frontier model makers and hyperscalers have frequently chosen creative (and sometimes food-centric codenames) for their models during public testing.
LMArena, a popular AI testing platform, allows users to pit two AI models against each other, and they vote for a winner. After the vote, the initially masked model names are revealed. Companies can choose both publicly released models and those still in development, hence the codenames.
Google doesn’t have any plans to change the model’s name.
“People responded really well,” Raisinghani said. “They were so impressed with it, and then they found the name funny, and that kind of grew discourse.”
Raisinghani also said her team is having fun with the banana wordplay and imagery.
“We’ve embraced the banana emoji as one of us. The team is split on the banana puns of it all,” she said. “But we’re glad people find the model appealing.”
