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-lite
Output tokens cost $0.53 per million on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and $0.66 per million on doubao-seed-1-6-lite. Input tokens cost $0.20 per million on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and $0.08 per million on doubao-seed-1-6-lite. Cached input tokens are billed at $0.20 per million on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and $0.08 per million on doubao-seed-1-6-lite. Context lengths are 256,000 tokens on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and 256,000 tokens on doubao-seed-1-6-lite. Time to first token (TTFT) measured on AIHubMix is 2.8s on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and 0.6s on doubao-seed-1-6-lite. Measured output throughput is 36.9 tok/s on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and 56.0 tok/s on doubao-seed-1-6-lite.
Doubao-Seed-1.6-lite is a brand new multimodal deep reasoning model that supports adjustable reasoning effort, with four modes: Minimal, Low, Medium, and High. It offers better cost performance, making it the best choice for common tasks, with a context window of up to 256k.
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-lite?
ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct: $0.53/M output tokens; doubao-seed-1-6-lite: $0.66/M. Use the cost calculator above to estimate your own workload.
Which responds faster?
doubao-seed-1-6-lite: 0.6s 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-lite accepts 256,000 input tokens. Maximum output per request is 32,000 tokens on ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct and 32,000 tokens on doubao-seed-1-6-lite.
Which one generates tokens faster?
doubao-seed-1-6-lite at 56.0 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-lite 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-lite 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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