Google · proprietary on Arena · first on Arena 14 August 2025

gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview (nano-banana)

48 days in first place

It held first place on Arena in Text to image (48 days).

Embed

Who held first place

<iframe src="https://jesseahawkins.com/frontier/embed/" title="Frontier: who held first place on each Arena leaderboard, and for how long" width="100%" height="560" style="border:0;max-width:100%" loading="lazy"></iframe>

Credits LMArena.

The open-weights catch-up

<iframe src="https://jesseahawkins.com/frontier/embed/catch-up/" title="Frontier: the days until open weights matched each closed leader" width="100%" height="900" style="border:0;max-width:100%" loading="lazy"></iframe>

Credits LMArena.

The saturation clock

<iframe src="https://jesseahawkins.com/frontier/embed/clock/" title="Frontier: the days from each benchmark’s release to a model at 90%" width="100%" height="640" style="border:0;max-width:100%" loading="lazy"></iframe>

Credits Epoch AI.

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Cite

This page

Jesse Hawkins, “gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview (nano-banana) · Frontier”, jesseahawkins.com, data retrieved 30 Oct 2026. https://jesseahawkins.com/frontier/gemini-2-5-flash-image-preview-nano-banana/. Data: LMArena, Arena leaderboard dataset, revision 4491b06, CC BY 4.0; Epoch AI, Capabilities & benchmarking, CC BY 4.0.

BibTeX

@misc{hawkins2026frontiergemini25flashimagepreviewnanobanana,
  author = {Hawkins, Jesse},
  title = {{gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview (nano-banana) · Frontier}},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://jesseahawkins.com/frontier/gemini-2-5-flash-image-preview-nano-banana/}},
  note = {Data: LMArena, Arena leaderboard dataset, revision 4491b06, CC BY 4.0; Epoch AI, Capabilities \& benchmarking, CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-10-30}
}

Arena · LMArena

LMArena, "Arena leaderboard dataset", Hugging Face, revision 4491b06. https://huggingface.co/datasets/lmarena-ai/leaderboard-dataset. CC BY 4.0.

Benchmarks · Epoch AI

Epoch AI, 'Capabilities & benchmarking'. Published online at epoch.ai. Retrieved from 'https://epoch.ai/benchmarks' [online resource]. CC BY 4.0.

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Text to image: 48 days in first place

place 36 of 82 on 26 October 2026

1st10th

On the board: 14 August 2025 to 26 October 2026, the newest snapshot
Score: 1149 (1146–1151) on 26 October 2026 · 907,282 votes
First place: 14 August 2025 to 1 October 2025 · 48 days
Catch-up: Open weights matched it on 1 October 2025, 48 days after it first took first place: hunyuan-image-3.0.

Not in Epoch AI’s benchmark data

No model in Epoch AI’s list is the same release as this Arena name. Epoch does not benchmark image models.

When each vendor retires it

every model’s dates

Google’s Gemini API 15 Jan 2026 gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview

Sources

Arena scores come from people voting between two anonymous answers. First place is the highest score; the top two are often within each other’s margin of error. LMArena, Arena leaderboard dataset, revision 4491b06, retrieved 30 October 2026; Epoch AI, Capabilities & benchmarking, retrieved 30 October 2026. Both CC BY 4.0. Retirement dates: each vendor’s own deprecation page, quoted and kept, listed with the record.