AI Poker: China Has Three Aces. Google, Your Play
September 19, 2025
No smart software involved. Just a dinobaby’s work.
TV poker seems to be a thing on free or low cost US television streams. A group of people squint, sigh, and fiddle as each tries to win the big pile of cash. Another poker game is underway in the “next big thing” of smart software or AI.
Google released the Nano Banana image generator. Social media hummed. Okay, that looks like a winning hand. But another player dropped some coin on the table, squinted at the Google, and smirked just a tiny bit.
“ByteDance Unveils New AI Image Model to Rival DeepMind’s Nano Banana” explains the poker play this way:
TikTok-owner ByteDance has launched its latest image generation artificial intelligence tool Seedream 4.0, which it said surpasses Google DeepMind’s viral “Nano Banana” AI image editor across several key indicators.
Now the cute jargon may make the poker hand friendly, there is menace behind the terminology. The write up states:
ByteDance claims that Seedream 4.0 beat Gemini 2.5 Flash Image for image generation and editing on its internal evaluation benchmark MagicBench, with stronger performance in prompt adherence, alignment and aesthetics.
Okay, prompt adherence, alignment (what the heck is that?), and aesthetics. That’s three aces right.
Who has the cost advantage? The write up says:
On Fal.ai, a global generative media hosting platform, Seedream 4.0 costs US$0.03 per generated image, while Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is priced at US$0.039.
I thought in poker one raised the stakes. Well, in AI poker one lowers the price in order to raise the stakes. These players are betting the money burned in the AI furnace will be “won” as the game progresses. Will AI poker turn up on the US free TV services? Probably. Burning cash makes for wonderful viewing, especially for those who are writing the checks.
What’s China’s view of this type of gambling? The write up says:
The state has signaled its support for AI-generated content by recognizing their copyright in late 2023, but has also recently introduced mandatory labelling of such content.
The game is not over. (Am I the only person who thinks that the name “nana banana” would have been better than “nano banana”?)
Stephen E Arnold, September 19, 2025
Comments
Got something to say?
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
