Seed-OSS is a series of open-source large language models developed by ByteDance's Seed team, designed specifically for powerful long-context processing, reasoning, agents, and general capabilities. Among this series, Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct is an instruction-tuned model with 36 billion parameters that natively supports ultra-long context lengths, enabling it to process massive documents or complex codebases in a single pass. This model is specially optimized for reasoning, code generation, and agent tasks (such as tool usage), while maintaining balanced and excellent general capabilities. A notable feature of this model is the "Thinking Budget" functionality, which allows users to flexibly adjust the inference length as needed, thereby effectively improving inference efficiency in practical applications.
ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct vs Grok 4.5
Output tokens cost $0.53 per million on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and $6.00 per million on Grok 4.5. Input tokens cost $0.20 per million on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and $2.00 per million on Grok 4.5. Cached input tokens are billed at $0.20 per million on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and $0.50 per million on Grok 4.5. Context lengths are 256,000 tokens on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and 500,000 tokens on Grok 4.5. Time to first token (TTFT) measured on AIHubMix is 0.7s on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and 1.7s on Grok 4.5. Measured output throughput is 32.5 tok/s on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and 26.2 tok/s on Grok 4.5.
Grok 4.5 was trained on datasets spanning knowledge in coding, science, engineering, and math. With both intelligent and efficient reasoning, Grok 4.5 excels at real engineering tasks and exceeds comparable leading models at these tasks.
Pricing & Specifications
Prices are per million tokens. Time to First Token and throughput are rolling averages measured on AIHubMix.
Promotional prices show the discounted rate; see each model page for promotion windows.
Activity Past 30 Days
Daily traffic served through AIHubMix — how demand for each model is trending.
Tokens / day
Requests / day
Performance Past 3 Days
Measured on real AIHubMix traffic, hourly buckets. Gaps mean no traffic in that hour.
Throughput (tok/s)
TTFT (s)
Uptime (%)
Cost calculator
Estimate your monthly bill for the same workload on each model.
Monthly = daily × 30. Discounted rates applied where a promotion is active.
FAQ
Which is cheaper: ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct, Grok 4.5?
ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct: $0.53/M output tokens; Grok 4.5: $6.00/M. Use the cost calculator above to estimate your own workload.
Which responds faster?
ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct: 0.7s time to first token measured on AIHubMix; see the live performance charts above for how each model behaves across the day.
How large is each context window?
ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct accepts 256,000 and Grok 4.5 accepts 500,000 input tokens. Maximum output per request is 32,000 tokens on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and 500,000 tokens on Grok 4.5.
Which one generates tokens faster?
ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct at 32.5 tok/s and Grok 4.5 at 26.2 tok/s, measured as output throughput on AIHubMix — a separate metric from time to first token.
What inputs and capabilities does each model support?
ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct accepts text and image input and supports function calling and structured outputs; Grok 4.5 accepts text and image input and supports thinking, tool calling, function calling, structured outputs and long context.
Can I call ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and Grok 4.5 with the same API key?
Yes. AIHubMix serves every model on this page behind one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so switching between them is a one-line change to the model field — no second account, key or SDK.
Popular comparisons
Related model match-ups readers also look at.
