Comment by vunderba
20 hours ago
If it's just the API you're interested in, Fal.ai has put Nano-Banana-Pro up for both generative and editing. A great deal less annoying to sign up for them since they're a pretty generalized provider of lots of AI related models.
In general a better option, in the early days of AI video I tried to generate a video of a golden retriever using Google's AI Studio. It generated 4 in the highest quality and charged me 36 bucks. Not a crazy amount but definitely an unwelcome suprise.
Fal.ai is pay as you go and has the cost right upfront.
Vertex AI Studio setting a default of 4 videos where each video is several dollars to generate is a very funny footgun.
100% agreed. Same reason that I use the OpenRouter API for most LLM usage.
Is there a model on Fal.ai that would make it easy to sharpen blurry video footage? I have found some websites, but apparently they are mostly scammy.
Unfortunately, this is a fairly difficult task. In my experience, even SOTA models like Nano Banana usually make little to no meaningful improvement to the image when given this kind of request.
You might be better off using a dedicated upscaler instead, since many of them naturally produce sharper images when adding details back in - especially some of the GAN-based ones.
If you’re looking for a more hands-off approach, it looks like Fal.ai provides access to the Topaz upscalers:
https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/topaz/upscale/image
Seconding the Topaz recommendation. Although be aware that is the Image upscaler model, and the parent commenter asked about video.
Here's the Fal-hosted video endpoint: https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/topaz/upscale/video
They also offer (multiple; confusing product lineup!) interactive apps for upscaling video on their own website - Topaz Video and Astra. And maybe more, who knows.
I have access to the interactive apps, and there are a lot of knobs that aren't exposed in the Fal API.
edit: lol I found a third offering on the Topaz site for this, "Video upscale" within the Express app. I have no idea which is the best, despite apparently having a subscription to all of them.
You want a deconvolution pipeline like https://bartwronski.com/2022/05/26/removing-blur-from-images...
Or more likely https://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~leojia/projects/motion_deblurri... for video
FYI that is an extremely challenging thing to do right. Especially if you care about accuracy and evidentiary detail. Not sure this is something that the current crop of AI tools are really tuned to do properly.
This is a good point. Some of the tools have a "creative mode" or "creativity" knob that hopefully drives this point home. But the simpler ones don't, and even with that setting dialed back it still has the same fundamental limitations/risks.
I'm dimestore cheap, I'd be exploding to frames and sharpening and reassembling with a ffmpeg>irfanview process Lol. It would be awfully expensive to do it with an AI model and the results would be expensive. Would a photo/video editing suite do it? Google photos with a pro script, or Adobe premiere elements, or would you be able to do it in yourself in DaVinci resolve? Or are you talking hundreds of hours of video?
There's the solution right there. Google is still growing its AI "sea legs". They've turned the ship around on a dime and things are still a little janky. Truly a "startup mode" pivot.
While we're on this subject of "Google has been stomping around like Godzilla", this is a nice place to state that I think the tide of AI is turning and the new battle lines are starting to appear. Google looks like it's going to lay waste to OpenAI and Anthropic and claim most of the market for itself. These companies do not have the cash flow and will have to train and build their asses off to keep up with where Google already is.
gpt-image-1 is 1/1000th of Nano Banana Pro and takes 80 seconds to generate outputs.
Two years ago Google looked weak. Now I really want to move a lot of my investments over to Google stock.
How are we feeling about Google putting everyone out of work and owning the future? It's starting to feel that way to me.
(FWIW, I really don't like how much power this one company has and how much of a monopoly it already was and is becoming.)
Valid questions, but I'd say that it's hard to know what the future holds when we get models that push the state of the art every few months. Claude sonnet 3.7 was released in February of this year. At the rate of change we're going, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with Sonnet 5 by March 2026.
As others have noted, Google's got a ways to go in making it easier to actually use their models, and though their recent releases have been impressive, it's not clear to me that the AI product category will remain free from the bad, old fiefdom culture that has doomed so many of their products over the last decade.
We can't help but overreact to every new adjustment on the leader boards. I don't think we're quite used to products in other industries gaining and losing advantage so quickly.
This is also my take on the market, although I also thought it looked like they were going to win 2 years ago too.
> How are we feeling about Google putting everyone out of work and owning the future? It's starting to feel that way to me.
Not great, but if one company or nation is going to come out on top in AI then every other realistic alternative at the moment is worse than Google.
OpenAI, Microsoft, Facebook/Meta, and X all have worse track records on ethics. Similarly for Russia, China, or the OPEC nations. Several of the European democracies would be reasonable stewards, but realistically they didn't have the capital to become dominant in AI by 2025 even if they had started immediately.
>OpenAI, Microsoft, Facebook/Meta, and X all have worse track records on ethics.
I'd argue Google is evil as OpenAI (at least lately), but I otherwise generally agree with your sentiment.
If Google does lay waste to its competitors, then I hope said competitors open source their frontier models before completely sinking.