Meet Seedream 4.0, China's answer to Google's Nano Banana AI

Bytedance's Seedream

To take on Nano Banana’s growing popularity, TikTok-owner ByteDance has launched its latest image generation AI tool, Seedream 4.0, which positions it as a formidable player in the AI imaging sector. It can produce high-resolution images in under two seconds and allows users to upload up to six reference images to maintain consistency across all the generated images. ByteDance claims that Seedream 4.0 beat Gemini 2.5 Flash Image for image generation and editing on its internal evaluation benchmark, MagicBench.

Seedream 4.0: Key features, avalaibility

Seedream 4.0 is being considered as a potential game-changer for designers, marketers, or content creators. It is not only capable of generating images from natural language text prompts but also aims to provide precise edits to existing images with user expectations, similar to what Gemini Nano Banana has been doing. These features are expected to benefit various industries ranging from product design and storyboarding to digital art and filmmaking.

Seedream 4.0 simplifies image editing by letting users issue commands in natural language instead of typing complex interfaces or instructions. It doesn’t require advanced editing tools or workflows and can make detailed, targeted changes without disrupting the details of an existing image. As competition intensifies, it will be interesting to see how ByteDance's Seedream 4.0 fares against competitors, especially Google’s DeepMind AI tools.

Seedream 4.0 is currently available on ByteDance’s local platforms, such as the Jimeng and Doubao AI apps, along with the Volcano Engine cloud platform for businesses. Its growing popularity globally suggests that it could be introduced here in the future, and it will be interesting to see how it fares against Gemini’s Nano Banana.