Z.ai’s open source GLM-Image beats Google’s Nano Banana Pro at complex text rendering, but not aesthetics
Carl Franzen January 14, 2026 Credit: VentureBeat made with GLM-Image on Fal.aiThe two big stories of AI in 2026 so far have been the incredible rise in usage and praise for Anthropic’s Claude Code and a similar huge boost in user adoption for Google’s Gemini 3 AI model family released late last year — the latter of which includes Nano Banana Pro (also known as Gemini 3 Pro Image), a powerful, fast, and flexible image generation model that renders complex, text-heavy infographics quickly and accurately, making it an excellent fit for enterprise use (think: collateral, trainings, onboarding, stationary, etc).But of course, both of those are proprietary offerings. And yet, open source rivals have not been far behind. This week, we got a new open source alternative to Nano Banana Pro in…
