Alibaba claims new Qwen Image 2.1 AI model beats Google Nano Banana 2.0 with minuscule 7B parameter model

Alibaba Cloud has released a new lightweight image generation AI model, called Qwen Image 2.1. Sporting just 7 billion parameters, it's an extremely lean open-weight model, able to run on even older consumer graphics cards like the RTX 3090. Despite its lightweight design, its developers claim it is more capable than a range of closed-weight models, including Google's Nano Banana 2.0.That is on its own internal benchmark, so we'd like to see some additional testing before making any concrete claims, but early reports suggest it's a very capable image model, with native transparency support and the ability to create unified images from a range of reference images.