Technically designated as Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Image on Google’s application programming interface (API), NB2 Lite is positioned as the fastest and most cost-effective option within Google’s creative model family, capable of generating images in 4 seconds at a flat rate of $0.034 per 1,000 images, News.Az reports, citing Venture Beat.
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This release lands alongside the public preview of Gemini Omni Flash, a multimodal conversational video generation and editing model.
However, while Omni Flash represents Google’s long-term bet on agentic video manipulation, Nano Banana 2 Lite is the immediate infrastructure workhorse, tailored specifically for high-throughput commercial application, rapid programmatic prototyping, and automated asset generation workflows.
At its core, Nano Banana 2 Lite is built directly upon the Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite architecture, engineered to solve the persistent tension between computational latency and operational overhead.
In high-velocity enterprise frameworks, traditional large-scale image models introduce significant friction due to multi-second processing delays and high per-token costs. Google’s new lightweight model circumvents these bottlenecks by generating a standard 1k resolution image in under four seconds.
This represents a stark performance optimization over its legacy predecessor, Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image), achieved through targeted enhancements in core baseline capabilities.
According to internal documentation, the model features upgraded world knowledge for drafting rough data visualizations and contextual layouts, enhanced character consistency to preserve identity across continuous image streams, and localized typographic rendering capabilities.
The trade-offs inherent to this “Lite” designation are transparently outlined in Google’s technical data sheets.
Unlike the broader standard Nano Banana 2 (NB2) and Nano Banana Pro (NB Pro) lines, which support versatile multi-resolution scaling across 1k, 2k, and 4k outputs, Nano Banana 2 Lite restricts its resolution support exclusively to a 1k canvas. Yet, within this specialized operational boundary, the architectural tuning yields surprising competitive efficiencies. In standardized internal benchmarks, Nano Banana 2 Lite achieved a Text to Image arena Elo score of 1251. This score comfortably eclipses the legacy NB1 score of 1151 and remarkably edges out the bulkier, more expensive NB Pro, which sits at 1245 in the same text-to-image track. For specialized editing tasks, the model maintains a single-image editing Elo score of 1308 and a multiple-image editing score of 1294, providing a highly optimized sweet spot for real-time applications.
