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Comment by jodleif | Hacker News Reader

1. Have you seen the Qwen offerings? They have great multi-modality, some even SOTA.

Qwen Image and Image Edit were among the best image models until Nano Banana Pro came along. I have tried some open image models and can confirm , the Chinese models are easily the best or very close to the best, but right now the Google model is even better... we'll see if the Chinese catch up again.

I'd say Google still hasn't caught up on the smaller model side at all, but we've all been (rightfully) wowed enough by Pro to ignore that for now.

Nano Banano Pro starts at 15 cents per image at <2k resolution, and is not strictly better than Seedream 4.0: yet the latter does 4K for 3 cents per image.

Add in the power of fine-tuning on their open weight models and I don't know if China actually needs to catch up.

I finetuned Qwen Image on 200 generations from Seedream 4.0 that were cleaned up with Nano Banana Pro, and got results that were as good and more reliable than either model could achieve otherwise.

FWIW, Qwen Z-Image is much better than Seedream and people (redditors) are saying its better than Nano Banana in their first trials. Its also 7B I think, and open.

I've used and finetuned Z-Image Turbo: it's nowhere near Seedream or even Qwen-Image when the latter is finetuned (also doesn't do image editing yet)

It is very good for the size and speed, and I'm excited for the Edit and Base variants... but Reddit has been a bit "over-excited" because it run on their small GPUs and isn't overly resistant to porn.

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