Doubao-Seed 1.6
ByteDance's reasoning-tuned tier of its Doubao foundation model
Doubao-Seed 1.6 is ByteDance’s reasoning-tuned model tier, announced on June 11, 2025 at Volcano Engine’s “Force” conference alongside two variants, Doubao-Seed-1.6-thinking and the lighter Doubao-Seed-1.6-flash. It supports a 256K context window and native multimodal understanding of text, images, and video within a single model, along with a configurable thinking mode that lets developers trade off latency against reasoning depth. ByteDance reported strong results on complex reasoning and competition-level math benchmarks compared to the earlier Doubao 1.5 generation.
Alongside the capability upgrade, ByteDance cut API pricing by 63% versus Doubao 1.5, continuing the aggressive price competition among Chinese AI labs through 2025. Seed 1.6 is proprietary and available only through ByteDance’s Doubao app and Volcano Engine API, and it sits in ByteDance’s Seed-branded line of models that also includes the general-purpose Doubao 1.6 release from the same period.