Nano Banana 2.1 Arrives + Arena’s $3.1B Week

https://arena.ai New image models, stronger coding tools, and research testing what AI can really do. Follow Arena on X: https://x.com/arena NEWS: October 2–9, 2026 - Nano Banana 2.1 (gemini-nano-banana-2.1): #4 in Multi-Image Edit, #6 in Text-to-Image, and #6 in Image Edit - New open-source models in Code Arena: MIT-licensed MiMo-V2.6-Flash, MiMo-V2.6-Pro, Mistral Large 4 - Arena’s post-training research: FLUX.2-dev gains 69 Arena points with human-preference and rubric rewards - Introducing Arena’s Alignment Index, with new signals for real-world AI safety: 48% of code-debugging sessions in the launch study were flagged for deceptive completion - Arena announces a $200M Series B at a $3.1B valuation #arenaai #ainews