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ByteDance Seed: the team building ByteDance's AI models

Seed is the research team at ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, responsible for its foundation models since 2023. Its models power the Doubao assistant among other products and are offered to businesses through cloud platforms.

Data as of October 22, 2026

Key figures

CountryChina
HeadquartersBeijing
Founded2023
TypeBig tech
Parent companyByteDance
Weights policyMixed (open and closed)
Model familiesSeed, Doubao-Seed, Seed-OSS, Seed-Coder
Consumer assistantDoubao
Official siteseed.bytedance.com · Developer API
Models tracked here5

A research team inside a tech giant

ByteDance, founded in 2012 and known for TikTok, Douyin and the CapCut video editor, brought its foundation-model work together in 2023 in a team called Seed. Its stated mission: “advancing the frontier of intelligence, in service of humanity.” Unlike a startup, Seed has no separate commercial existence: its models are built into ByteDance products and sold through its cloud platforms.

A wide range of model families

On the large language model side, the Seed series (sold as Doubao-Seed) covers reasoning, coding and AI agent tasks. Recent versions are pitched as models for real-world productivity that can chain actions together. Variants exist for programming and for lighter workloads.

Alongside them, Seed develops the multimodal models that built its reputation: Seedream for image generation, Seedance for video, plus audio models and real-time voice dialogue.

A mixed approach to weights

The flagship models stay closed: you use them through ByteDance apps and APIs. But the team also releases open-weight models. Seed-OSS-36B, for instance, is under the Apache 2.0 license, one of the most permissive for commercial use, and the small Seed-Coder family of coding models is MIT-licensed. The ByteDance-Seed organization on Hugging Face also hosts research models (code, proteins, video) and datasets such as Multi-SWE-bench.

Where to find Seed models

  • In ByteDance products: the Doubao assistant in China, the Dola assistant, the Dreamina creative workspace, Lark and CapCut.
  • Via API: Volcano Engine in China, BytePlus ModelArk internationally (Seed’s official site).
  • As downloads for the open models.

In practice, Seed’s appeal lies in the breadth of its catalog, from text to video, under a single provider. If you have compliance requirements, check which region and which platform will process your data before you choose between Volcano Engine and BytePlus. To compare it with other Chinese players, see the Alibaba profile or our AI labs page.

ByteDance Seed models tracked on this site

ModelsReleasedCapability indexPrice (input / output)
Seed 2.1 TurboJune 23, 2026—$0.50 / $2.5
Seed 2.0 CodeFebruary 14, 2026—$0.50 / $3
Seed 2.0 MiniFebruary 14, 2026—$0.10 / $0.40
Seed 2.0 LiteFebruary 14, 2026—$0.13 / $0.76
Seed 2.0 ProFebruary 14, 2026—$0.50 / $3

Frequently asked questions

How are Seed and Doubao related?

Seed is the team that builds the models; Doubao is ByteDance's consumer assistant that uses them. On cloud platforms, the flagship models are often labeled Doubao-Seed.

Does ByteDance Seed release open-weight models?

Some of them. Seed-OSS-36B, for example, is published on Hugging Face under the very permissive Apache 2.0 license. The flagship Seed models, however, are only available through ByteDance's own services.

How can I use Seed models in my app?

In China, through the Volcano Engine cloud platform; internationally, through BytePlus ModelArk. Both expose the language, image (Seedream) and video (Seedance) models via API.

Does Seed only work on text?

No. The team also builds image (Seedream), video (Seedance), audio, real-time voice conversation and robotics models.

Data sources

Data as of October 22, 2026

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