ByteDance Seed 2.0: Doubao AI Benchmarks & Complete Guide

What Is Seed 2.0?

Seed 2.0 is ByteDance's second-generation foundation model family, purpose-built to serve as the intelligence backbone for the Doubao app and Volcano Engine API platform. Unlike single-model releases from competitors, ByteDance ships four distinct variants optimized for different performance-cost trade-offs — from the flagship Pro for frontier reasoning to the lightweight Mini for high-throughput batch processing.

The naming convention reflects ByteDance's internal AI research division (Seed Team), which has been developing foundation models since 2023. Seed 2.0 succeeds the original Seed model family and incorporates advances in reinforcement learning, multimodal fusion, and agentic task execution that ByteDance has been refining across its product ecosystem.

Model Family: Pro, Lite, Mini & Code

ByteDance designed the Seed 2.0 family as a tiered system where each variant targets specific deployment scenarios. The Pro handles frontier reasoning tasks, the Lite balances capability with cost, the Mini enables high-throughput batch processing, and the Code variant specializes in software development workflows.

Use Case Breakdown

Pro targets deep reasoning, complex coding, and research workflows where accuracy matters more than latency. It achieves gold medals on ICPC, IMO, and CMO competitions and handles multi-step agentic tasks with 77.3 BrowseComp accuracy.

Lite serves as the default production model, balancing strong benchmark scores with lower inference costs. At 93 AIME 2025 and 2233 Codeforces, it delivers competitive performance for most enterprise workloads without the Pro's overhead.

Mini is optimized for high-throughput scenarios like batch classification, content moderation, and lightweight generation. Its scores (87 AIME 2025, 1644 Codeforces) remain competitive while enabling significantly faster inference.

Code shares the Pro's coding benchmarks (3020 Codeforces, 87.8 LiveCodeBench v6) but is specifically tuned for software development tasks including code generation, debugging, repository-level understanding, and automated pull request reviews.

Benchmark Performance

Seed 2.0 Pro delivers strong benchmark results across reasoning, mathematics, and coding categories. ByteDance reports that Pro achieves gold medals on ICPC, IMO, and CMO — competition-level mathematical reasoning that places it among the top AI systems available.

Reasoning & Mathematics

Coding & Engineering

Multimodal & Video Understanding

One of Seed 2.0's standout capabilities is hour-long video processing. The Pro variant scores 89.5 on VideoMME, demonstrating strong motion perception, temporal reasoning, and the ability to answer questions about streaming video content. ByteDance has integrated this directly into the Doubao app through its VideoCut tool for automated video analysis.

Video Understanding Benchmarks

Vision & Document Understanding

Beyond video, Seed 2.0 delivers strong results on visual reasoning and document understanding tasks. The Pro scores 88.8 on MathVision, 85.4 on MMMU, and demonstrates robust OCR and chart interpretation capabilities through CharXiv and OCRBench evaluations.

Agentic Capabilities

Seed 2.0 Pro demonstrates strong agentic performance across web browsing, coding agent, and tool-use benchmarks. The 77.3 BrowseComp score indicates the model can autonomously navigate web pages, gather information, and complete multi-step research tasks — a capability ByteDance leverages for its deep research product within Doubao.

Tool Use & Task Automation

On the τ²-Bench tool-use benchmark, Seed 2.0 Pro scores 90.4 on retail scenarios and 94.2 on telecom scenarios — demonstrating the model's ability to interact with external APIs, databases, and structured tools. Combined with the Terminal Bench coding agent score of 55.8 and WideSearch score of 74.7, these results suggest Seed 2.0 can handle complex multi-step workflows that require both reasoning and tool execution.

ByteDance has deployed these agentic capabilities into production features including deep research (multi-step web research with synthesis), coding assistants (via TRAE IDE), and autonomous search agents. The Qwen 3.5 agentic guide provides a broader comparison of agentic AI capabilities across Chinese model families.

Pricing & API Access

ByteDance positions Seed 2.0 at approximately 10x lower cost than Western competitors — a pricing strategy that follows the aggressive cost competition between Chinese AI providers. API access is available through the Volcano Engine platform with the model ID "doubao-seed-2-0-pro" for the flagship variant.

Access Channels

ByteDance provides three primary ways to access Seed 2.0 capabilities. The Doubao App offers consumer-facing access with conversational AI, document analysis, and video processing built in. The TRAE platform is ByteDance's AI coding IDE that integrates Seed 2.0 Code for development workflows. The Volcano Engine API provides programmatic access for developers building custom applications.

For deeper context on how Seed 2.0 compares to other Chinese AI models in terms of pricing and capabilities, see our DeepSeek vs Qwen vs Mistral comparison.

How to Access the Seed 2.0 API

The Seed 2.0 API is available through Volcano Engine with OpenAI SDK compatibility. This means existing OpenAI or Claude integrations can be migrated by changing the base URL and API key. Here's a basic example using the OpenAI Python SDK:

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    api_key="your-volcano-engine-api-key",
    base_url="https://ark.cn-beijing.volces.com/api/v3"
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="doubao-seed-2-0-pro",
    messages=[
        {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
        {"role": "user", "content": "Explain the Seed 2.0 model architecture."}
    ],
    stream=True
)

for chunk in response:
    if chunk.choices[0].delta.content:
        print(chunk.choices[0].delta.content, end="")

TypeScript / Node.js

import OpenAI from "openai";

const client = new OpenAI({
  apiKey: process.env.VOLCANO_ENGINE_API_KEY,
  baseURL: "https://ark.cn-beijing.volces.com/api/v3",
});

const response = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: "doubao-seed-2-0-pro",
  messages: [
    { role: "system", content: "You are a helpful assistant." },
    { role: "user", content: "Analyze this codebase for potential issues." },
  ],
});

console.log(response.choices[0].message.content);

Access Options

Conclusion

Seed 2.0 represents ByteDance's strongest entry into the frontier AI competition. With the Pro variant scoring 98.3 on AIME 2025, achieving a 3020 Codeforces rating, and processing hour-long videos at 89.5 VideoMME accuracy, the benchmark numbers place it among the top AI systems available — directly competitive with GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro across reasoning, coding, and multimodal categories.

The four-tier model family (Pro, Lite, Mini, Code) provides flexibility for different deployment scenarios, while the ~10x price reduction compared to Western competitors makes frontier-level AI accessible to a broader range of applications. With 200 million Doubao users already running on Seed 2.0, this is production-tested AI at scale — not just benchmark performance. As independent verification of ByteDance's claims continues, Seed 2.0 is worth evaluating for any team that needs competitive AI capabilities without premium Western pricing.

Frequently Asked Questions