Google unveils Nano Banana 2!

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Welcome to another issue of the Neural Frontier 🙋‍♂️. 

You’ve seen the headlines, so why don’t we skip the niceties and jump right in?

Here we go!

In a rush? Here's your quick byte: 

🎨 Google unveils Nano Banana 2!

🧑‍💻 Perplexity introduces Perplexity Computer.

🚀 Claude Cowork gets more plug-ins for finance, engineering, and design!

⚡ The Neural Frontier’s weekly spotlight: 3 AI tools making the rounds this week.

🎨 Google unveils Nano Banana 2!

Google DeepMind is upgrading its image generation lineup with Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image) — a model that blends the creative precision of Nano Banana Pro with the speed of Gemini Flash.

The pitch is simple: production-ready quality, world-aware reasoning, and subject consistency — without sacrificing speed.

⚡ What’s new in Nano Banana 2

Nano Banana 2 inherits Pro-level intelligence but runs at Flash velocity, making rapid iteration practical for everyday workflows.

Here’s what stands out:

• Advanced world knowledge: The model draws on Gemini’s broader understanding of real-world context and live web search grounding. That means more accurate depictions of specific subjects, plus stronger support for infographics, diagrams, and data visualizations.

• Accurate text rendering (and translation): Clean, legible text inside images — whether you’re creating mockups, posters, or greeting cards. You can also localize text within an image for different languages.

• Subject consistency at scale: Maintain the resemblance of up to five characters and fidelity across as many as 14 objects in a workflow — useful for storyboarding or brand continuity.

• Stronger instruction following: Complex prompts are handled with more precision, reducing the gap between what you describe and what you get.

• Production-ready specs: Full control across aspect ratios and resolutions from 512px to 4K — optimized for everything from vertical social posts to widescreen presentations.

• Improved visual fidelity: Richer textures, sharper detail, and better lighting — delivered at Flash speeds.

In short, Nano Banana 2 aims to collapse the old tradeoff: you no longer have to choose between fast drafts and high-quality output.

🛠️ Where you can use it

Nano Banana 2 is rolling out broadly across Google’s ecosystem:

• Gemini app (replacing Nano Banana Pro as default, with Pro still accessible for specialized tasks)

• Google Search via AI Mode and Lens

• AI Studio + Gemini API (preview)

• Vertex AI (Google Cloud)

• Flow, where it becomes the default image model

• Google Ads, powering creative suggestions during campaign creation

This positioning makes it clear: Nano Banana 2 isn’t just for creators — it’s meant for marketers, developers, businesses, and everyday users.

🧾 Built-in provenance and verification

As generative media becomes more powerful, Google is doubling down on transparency.

Nano Banana 2 outputs are supported by:

• SynthID watermarking

• C2PA Content Credentials, which help verify how AI was used in creating media

Google says SynthID verification inside the Gemini app has already been used more than 20 million times, with broader verification features coming soon.

🧑‍💻 Perplexity introduces Perplexity Computer.

Perplexity just unveiled what it’s calling the next evolution of AI systems: Perplexity Computer — a general-purpose digital worker designed to go beyond chat and even beyond typical AI agents.

The idea is ambitious: instead of giving you answers or completing a single task, Perplexity Computer creates and executes entire workflows, running for hours — or even months — if needed.

🚀 From chatbots to long-running AI systems

Most AI tools today fall into two buckets:

• Chat interfaces that answer questions

• Agents that complete specific tasks

Perplexity says that’s no longer enough. As frontier models become more capable, the real limitation isn’t intelligence — it’s the products wrapped around them.

Perplexity Computer aims to remove that bottleneck. It operates software the same way a human coworker would — using real browsers, real filesystems, APIs, and tools — but it coordinates everything automatically in isolated compute environments.

You describe an outcome. The system:

1. Breaks it into tasks and subtasks

2. Spawns sub-agents to handle each piece

3. Orchestrates research, coding, document generation, and API calls

4. Delivers a finished result

All asynchronously. You can step away while it works — or run dozens of instances in parallel.

🧠 Intelligent multi-model orchestration

A core differentiator is model-agnostic orchestration.

Rather than relying on a single AI model, Perplexity Computer dynamically assigns tasks to whichever frontier model performs best at them. At launch, that includes:

• Claude Opus 4.6 for core reasoning

• Gemini for deep research

• Nano Banana for image generation

• Veo 3.1 for video

• Grok for lightweight, high-speed tasks

• ChatGPT 5.2 for long-context recall and broad search

The system routes subtasks intelligently — and users can manually select models when needed. As models specialize further, Perplexity’s bet is that orchestration — not raw model size — becomes the real advantage.

🔄 A natural evolution for Perplexity

Perplexity’s broader strategy has been building toward this.

The company launched Comet, an AI-native browser, and later Comet Assistant, laying groundwork for persistent memory, task management, and deep research workflows. It has also positioned itself as model-agnostic from the beginning, emphasizing user choice and flexibility.

Perplexity Computer extends that philosophy: the most powerful AI system isn’t built on one model — it’s built on coordinating all of them.

🔓 Availability

Perplexity Computer is available now to Perplexity Max subscribers, with plans to expand to Enterprise Max users soon.

If chatbots gave you answers and agents completed tasks, Perplexity Computer is positioning itself as something larger: an AI system that plans, delegates, and executes complex digital work from start to finish.

🚀 Claude Cowork gets more plug-ins for finance, engineering, and design!

Anthropic is making its most forceful push yet into the workplace with a new enterprise agents program — a plug-in-based system designed to make AI agents practical, customizable, and IT-friendly.

After a year of lofty promises around “agentic AI,” Anthropic is arguing that the problem wasn’t model capability — it was deployment.

“2025 was meant to be the year agents transformed the enterprise,” said Kate Jensen, Anthropic’s head of Americas. “It wasn’t a failure of effort. It was a failure of approach.”

This new program is meant to fix that.

🔌 Plug-ins built for real departments

At the core of the rollout is a structured plug-in system that lets companies deploy pre-built Claude-powered agents tailored to specific functions.

Launch plug-ins target common enterprise teams, including:

• Finance — market research, competitive analysis, financial modeling

• Legal — document drafting and review workflows

• HR — job descriptions, onboarding materials, offer letters

Each comes with baseline capabilities that organizations can modify to fit internal processes, policies, and data flows.

The bigger goal? Making agents feel less like experimental tools and more like governed enterprise software.

🛠️ Built for IT, not just enthusiasts

Much of this builds on earlier launches like Claude Cowork and Anthropic’s plug-in research preview. The difference now is operational polish.

The enterprise agents program adds:

• Private internal software marketplaces

• Centralized admin controls

• Controlled data access and permissions

• Customizable plug-ins managed at the organizational level

In other words, agents can now be deployed with the same oversight and governance controls IT teams expect when rolling out traditional SaaS tools.

Anthropic’s product team says the ambition is clear: “Everybody having their own custom agent.”

🔗 Deeper enterprise integrations

The launch also introduces new connectors that allow Claude-powered agents to pull context directly from enterprise systems.

New integrations include:

• Gmail

• DocuSign

• Clay

These connectors give agents access to live organizational data — making outputs more relevant and actionable.

If widely adopted, Anthropic’s plug-in strategy could encroach on traditional SaaS categories. Instead of buying separate tools for modeling, research, document drafting, or HR workflows, companies could lean on configurable AI agents that operate across systems.

The pitch isn’t that agents replace all enterprise software overnight. It’s that with the right structure, permissions, and context, AI agents can begin handling a meaningful share of everyday knowledge work.

⚡ The Neural Frontier’s weekly spotlight: 3 AI tools making the rounds this week. 

1. ⌨️ TypeBoost is a Mac AI writing assistant that applies custom prompts to selected text in any app with one keyboard shortcut, featuring voice input, multi-language translation across 95 languages, and personalized prompt templates for emails, social posts, and content creation.

2. 🎨 Key Visual is an automated marketing content creation platform that syncs with Figma design systems to generate multi-format social media videos and images using live CMS data, APIs, spreadsheets, and AI prompts with auto-scaling layouts and real-time updates.

3. 🎬 Reloop is an AI UGC ad creation platform that generates winning video ads in under 30 seconds through conversational prompts, featuring 200+ realistic avatars, voice cloning, auto-captions, and a pixel-perfect editor without requiring technical skills or prompting expertise.

In conclusion…

We’d like to say we’re officially in “product-release” season, but the truth is, did we ever leave?

Either way, we’re all for it. Who knows, maybe next week holds a stunner from the incredible folks at OpenAI. 

Till then, we’ll remain on the pulse, while you keep an eye on that inbox. As always, we’ll catch you next week👋!