ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6
Analysis Summary
Seed 1.6 is ByteDance Seed's higher-priced general variant, with text, image, and video input, a 262K context window, tool use, and function calling. Those capabilities make it relevant to multimodal content operations, campaign asset review, document workflows, and applications that need external actions.
It may suit client content production, media summarisation, visual quality checks, and structured automation where the task boundaries are clear. The supplied data contains no benchmark results, so there is no direct evidence here for coding quality, reasoning depth, instruction following, or reliable autonomous execution. Teams should test it against representative briefs and failure cases before assigning it to critical work.
Pricing is $0.25 per million input tokens and $2 per million output tokens, still suitable for targeted workflows. Choose it when multimodal coverage matters more than proven benchmark depth.
Assessed August 9, 2026
Editorial notes
Seed 1.6 combines image and video understanding, a 262K context window, and function calling for content and automation workflows. No benchmark results are supplied, so complex reasoning and coding use require validation before deployment.
Rankings consider pricing, capabilities, benchmarks, and real-world applicability and are refreshed as new models launch. Feedback?
DFO Verdict
Seed 1.6 combines image and video understanding, a 262K context window, and function calling for content and automation workflows. No benchmark results are supplied, so complex reasoning and coding use require validation before deployment.
How ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 compares
Its 262K-token context window is larger than 74% of the models we list. At $0.25 per million input tokens it is cheaper than 52% of comparable models.
Dark bar = input · light bar = output, scaled to the priciest peer.
1M tokens ≈ 8 full-length novels or ~2,500 pages of business documents in a single request.
Strongest on value. The pulled-in technical corner is the trade-off, and if the shape matters more than the price, this is your model.
Compare shapes side-by-side →Pricing
| Token Type | Cost per 1M tokens | Cost per 1K tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.25 | $0.000250 |
| Output | $2.00 | $0.002000 |
What would ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 cost your business?
Pick the job that looks most like yours, then fine-tune with the sliders. Estimates update live.
A website chatbot handling around 100 customer conversations a day, a few short messages each.
Full calculator with 688 models → Price Calculator
These numbers get smaller with the right architecture.
We route routine calls to cheap models and save ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 for the hard ones. Most clients cut their estimate by 60-80%.
Talk to our teamAbout ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6
Seed 1.6 is a general-purpose model released by the ByteDance Seed team. It incorporates multimodal capabilities and adaptive deep thinking with a 256K context window.
Frequently asked questions about ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6
How much does ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 cost?
ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 costs $0.25 per million input tokens and $2.00 per million output tokens.
What is the context window of ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6?
ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 has a context window of 262,144 tokens (262K).
What can ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 do?
ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 supports image/vision input, tool use, and function calling.
Who created ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6?
ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 is developed by ByteDance Seed and was released on December 23, 2025.
