Inside Google’s quest to build AI products for creatives

When Google’s Nano Banana image-generation tool first appeared in the wild in summer 2025, it quickly captured the internet’s attention for its ability to edit existing photos. The company also boasts one of the industry’s leading video models and has gained significant traction in AI media generation. Just this week, Google announced that users have generated than 50B images with Nano Banana to date. However, like the rest of the industry, a lot of it is still fly-by use. People ask Google’s Gemini app to generate an image or short video clip and then move on.