Feels like ai image generation has plateaud.

Coding related have had massive step-up improvements over time.

The same cannot be said for image generation. If anything, I swear it's gone backwards.

It peaked with very early midjourney (like 2022), maybe follow ups with stable diffusion, and then with some of the nano banana models for actual editing. But overall, very lackluster in comparison to other areas.

Your feeling is generally right. There have been no seminal moments in image generation anymore in the last couple of months. Most attention from the big labs has gone to video since that‘s where the money is. We have a page to track the history of it all here https://lumenfall.ai/arena/history

(Right now missing some models which I‘ll add today.)

There have been a lot of strides in open-weight models, well beyond SDXL. Flux, back in August of 2024 was a game changer, finally allowing us to move past SDXL’s nuclear pile of comma-delimited keywords for prompting and allowing more natural language.

And this summer we got Ideogram V4 and Krea2, both of which are highly capable. You can see how the open/closed models have advanced since SDXL in the Progress tab.

https://genai-showdown.specr.net

MJ is pretty out-of-date by this point though it can still be fun from an image space exploration perspective. It scored a rather pitiful 2 out of 15 on my bench back in the summer of 2025.

You could argue that progress has been relatively flat since Nano Banana Pro, but that's still less than a full year old (just barely), and that was the first model that could really fully maintain visual consistency across complex edits. The GPT ones are a little stylistically disappointing in ways, but they've still been making steady progress too. I don't think we can claim a peak just yet, even if it's been slower.

Seedream 4 continues to be the best model by far at character consistency. I havnt done my tests on this model yet, however.

There’s less money to be made with images, than code gen.

Investment in new models follows the money.

Coding flattened out like 9 months ago. In reality, people are getting dumber and lazier from over using them, so they feel like they're improving when they aren't really, outside some areas like RE.

In reality RE has only gotten better because they RLd it into the models because they NEED data, so now every kid is decomping proprietary softwate and sending them back great training data.