The hilarious, 2:30 AM origin story of how ‘Nano Banana’ got its name

Google’s latest AI image model, Nano Banana, has been a viral sensation. In just a few short weeks, users have generated over 5 billion images with it, creating viral trends, restoring old photos, and even bringing deceased loved ones into new family portraits. It’s a technical marvel, largely because it’s the first model that can actually make you look like you, not just an AI version of you.

But for all its technical prowess, the one question remained: why is it called Nano Banana? In the latest episode of the Made by Google Podcast, host Rachid Finge sat down with David Sharon, a Group Product Manager on the Gemini app team, to get the inside story. And the answer is actuall pretty hilarious.

A 2:30 AM moment of brilliance

First, David Sharon clarified that the official, not-catchy name for the model is actually “Gemini 2.5 Flash image.” Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

The “Nano Banana” name, it turns out, was never the result of a high-level branding meeting. It was a 2:30 AM placeholder. Sharon explained that before the model was publicly released, Google submitted it to LM Arena, an external website where users can anonymously vote on the quality of different AI models. When a PM named Nina was submitting the model to the site, she needed a placeholder name.

“I would love to tell you that a lot of thought and rigor went into the name Nano Banana,” Sharon said, “but the truth is that at 2:30 in the morning, Nina had a moment of brilliance to call the placeholder Nano Banana.”

The name that went viral

Google didn’t expect the anonymous model to get much traffic on the technical ranking site. Instead, it “went viral all over the world.” People on X started buzzing about this mysterious, powerful new model called “Nano Banana.” By the time Google was ready to officially launch the model with its proper name, the public had already decided.

“When we launched it with the official name, people kept calling it Nano Banana,” Sharon said. “So we’ve adopted that name also and hugged it because it really is a great name.”

The happy accident has now been fully embraced by the team. If you go into the Gemini app today, you’ll see banana emojis everywhere, a nod to the 2:30 AM decision that accidentally created one of the most recognizable brands in AI at the moment.