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 doubao-seed-1-6-flash
Output tokens cost $0.53 per million on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and $0.44 per million on doubao-seed-1-6-flash. Input tokens cost $0.20 per million on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and $0.04 per million on doubao-seed-1-6-flash. Cached input tokens are billed at $0.20 per million on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and $0.04 per million on doubao-seed-1-6-flash. Context lengths are 256,000 tokens on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and 256,000 tokens on doubao-seed-1-6-flash. Time to first token (TTFT) measured on AIHubMix is 2.8s on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and 0.5s on doubao-seed-1-6-flash. Measured output throughput is 36.9 tok/s on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and 93.2 tok/s on doubao-seed-1-6-flash.
Doubao-Seed-1.6-flash is an extremely fast multimodal deep thinking model, with TPOT requiring only 10ms. It supports both text and visual understanding, with its text comprehension skills surpassing the previous generation lite model and its visual understanding on par with competitor's pro series models. It supports a 256k context window and an output length of up to 16k tokens.
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
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Performance Past 3 Days
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Cost calculator
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Monthly = daily × 30. Discounted rates applied where a promotion is active.
FAQ
Which is cheaper: ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct, doubao-seed-1-6-flash?
doubao-seed-1-6-flash: $0.44/M output tokens; ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct: $0.53/M. Use the cost calculator above to estimate your own workload.
Which responds faster?
doubao-seed-1-6-flash: 0.5s 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 doubao-seed-1-6-flash accepts 256,000 input tokens. Maximum output per request is 32,000 tokens on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and 33,000 tokens on doubao-seed-1-6-flash.
Which one generates tokens faster?
doubao-seed-1-6-flash at 93.2 tok/s and ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct at 36.9 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; doubao-seed-1-6-flash accepts text, image and video input and supports function calling and structured outputs.
Can I call ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and doubao-seed-1-6-flash 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.
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