ByteDance
Updated May 2026Seed / Doubao
ByteDance's model stack for agents and generated media
Seed is ByteDance's foundation model program behind Doubao and its media models. It spans LLMs, vision-language models, diffusion language models, image generation, and audio-video generation. Seed is important because ByteDance brings massive consumer-product feedback loops, recommendation infrastructure, and creator tooling into model development.
Variants
6
Best at
strong creator-media stack
Max context
256K
tokens
Pricing
Volcano Engine
varies
per hosted API usage
Variants
Sort the table by context window or cost to find the right variant. Click any version below for a battle card with ranks, pricing notes, and official links.
| Modalities | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Seed 2.0 seed-2.0 | 256K | varies / varies | 2026 | textvisionaudiovideocode |
Seed 1.8 seed-1.8 | 256K | varies / varies | 2026 | textcode |
Seed 1.5 / Doubao-1.5-pro doubao-1.5-pro | 256K | varies / varies | 2025 | textcode |
Seed 1.5-VL seed-1.5-vl | 128K | varies / varies | 2025 | textvision |
Seedance 2.0 seedance-2.0 | — | varies / varies | 2026 | audiovideo |
Seedream 5.0 Lite seedream-5.0-lite | — | varies / varies | 2026 | image |
Battle card
Context rank
#1
within Seed / Doubao
Capability rank
#1
modalities + reasoning
Weights
Closed
API/app access
Best fights to pick
- multimodal agents
- workflow automation
- creator tools
- Doubao apps
Rankings are Tendril directory ranks, computed from the model data shown here. Public benchmark leaderboards change often, so official docs and current benchmark pages should be checked before buying or deploying.
Learn
Lessons about this model
Structured lessons that cover Seed / Doubao directly or put it in context alongside its rivals.
Seed / Doubao: Family Map
Seed / Doubao: Flagship Picker
Seed / Doubao: Cost And Context
Seed / Doubao: Reasoning Mode
Seed / Doubao: Multimodal Workflows
Seed / Doubao: Coding And Software Tasks
Seed / Doubao: Agents And Tool Use
Seed / Doubao: Local Or Private Deployment
Seed / Doubao: Benchmarks And Reality Checks
Seed / Doubao: Safety And Limits
Seed / Doubao: Prompt Recipes
Seed / Doubao: Industry Use Cases
Seed / Doubao: Compare Against Rivals
Seed / Doubao: Build A Mini Workflow
Seed / Doubao: Capstone Selection Memo
Check yourself
Quizzes
Short, mixed-difficulty quiz sets on Seed / Doubao and its model family.
Seed / Doubao Model Family Quiz
5 questions
A short quiz on where Seed / Doubao fits, which variants matter, and how to choose it responsibly.
Start quiz →Hands-on
Try these prompts
Ready-made prompts that show Seed / Doubao at its best. Use them in your own AI workspace, then compare the output with what you learned in Tendril.
Seed / Doubao same-task bakeoff
BuildersCompare Seed / Doubao against a cheaper and stronger rival on one real task.
Use Seed / Doubao for this task, then compare with one cheaper model and one stronger model: summarize a 10-page policy document into risks, decisions, owners, and open questions.
Seed / Doubao failure-mode log
CreatorsTrack where Seed / Doubao fails instead of only saving the best output.
Run this task three times. For every answer, mark failures as factual error, formatting error, weak reasoning, refusal, or missing citation.
Print & keep
Printable reference
One-page summaries and flowcharts — great for desks, classrooms, or study sessions.
Go deeper
Official resources
Straight from the lab — docs, API references, and the chat surfaces you can try today.
Strengths
- strong creator-media stack
- agent-focused LLMs
- consumer-product feedback loops
Limits
- global API access can be region-specific
- model names vary between Seed, Doubao, and Volcano Engine
- closed weights for many flagship models