Eseandre Mordi
⬤ ByteDance's Seedream 4.5 just grabbed the silver medal in the Artificial Analysis Image Arena, landing right behind Google's Nano Banana Pro based on Gemini Pro Image. The updated model pushed past its predecessor Seedream 4.0, Nano Banana built on Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, and Black Forest Labs' FLUX.2 [pro], marking a serious shake-up in the image editing AI landscape.
⬤ The numbers tell the story: Seedream 4.5 hit an ELO score of 1,197, while Google's champion Nano Banana Pro sits at 1,256. Seedream 4.0 isn't far behind at 1,187, with competing models like Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) and FLUX.2 [pro] trailing further back. This makes Seedream 4.5 the strongest non-Google image editing model on the platform right now.
⬤ On the Text-to-Image leaderboard, Seedream 4.5 holds fifth place, coming in behind ByteDance's own Seedream 4.0 but staying ahead of the original Nano Banana and Z-Image Turbo. The model handles up to ten input images per request and cranks out results at resolutions reaching 4K.
⬤ Pricing wise, Seedream 4.5 runs $40 per 1,000 images through the BytePlus API, up from $30 for Seedream 4.0. That puts it roughly on par with Google's original Nano Banana at $39 per 1,000 images on Google Vertex. With availability across BytePlus, fal, Replicate, and Runware, the battle between ByteDance and Google's Gemini models is heating up as image generation tech keeps getting better across the board.
Eseandre Mordi
