Nano Banana 2, Nano Banana Pro, GPT Image 2, FLUX.2 and MAI-Image-2.5 — what each one is genuinely best at, what changed in 2026, and how to pick one for real work.
If your mental model of AI image generation is "DALL-E versus Midjourney versus Stable Diffusion," it is out of date. Not slightly — comprehensively. Every model that matters for production work in September 2026 either did not exist or was not generally available eighteen months ago.
This is a plain accounting of what is current, what each one is actually good at, and which to reach for depending on the job. No leaderboard worship, and where credible sources disagree, this page says so rather than picking a winner.
Four things reshaped the field, and they are worth naming because each one changes a workflow decision.