Welcome to The Prompt, your Monday dive into the world of AI that puts Asia front and center. From Big Tech’s power players to the region’s scrappy disruptors, we cover it all. Want full access to all our AI reporting? Subscribe to us here.
Hi there,
AI went bananas last week. Literally. Almost everyone in my tech circle was having fun with Nano Banana, Google’s latest image generation and editing model.
It quickly rose to the top of LMArena’s leaderboard, where people pit two AI models and vote for the best results without knowing which is which. Nano Banana – or technically Gemini 2.5 Flash Image – won by a long shot, with over 2.5 million votes.
Our in-house designer tested it, and here’s the result. Any thoughts?
Image credit: Made by Tech in Asia with the help of Google’s Nano Banana
Of course, when there’s hype, there are opportunists.
One example is a website named Nanobanana.ai. It has no ties to Google at all and is clearly just a wrapper around Google’s model. Still, it’s enjoying its place at the top of internet searches for the keyword “nano banana.”
Gemini has always been good at editing images, as demonstrated by its previous version in March. But what makes it different this time around is how Nano Banana can better maintain the appearance of a character or object across multiple edits, essentially remembering details instead of generating entirely new things every time.
Another fun use case of Nano Banana that many people have been messing around with is merging multiple images together. You can try this out yourself using Google’s own template app in its AI Studio.
And of course it didn’t take long before someone used the model to put Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg together in one very popular scene of the Breaking Bad TV series.
Bananas aside, this week’s issue features three visual stories that we scraped together to help you understand Asia’s AI landscape better. These cover topics from the key AI startups in India and Southeast Asia to the brilliant Asian minds behind Big Tech’s foundation models.
Consider this your weekly fruit basket of insights.
Glenn Kaonang, journalist
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