Seed 1.6

Seed 1.6 is a general-purpose model from ByteDance's Seed team, released in late 2025. It combines multimodal understanding (text and visual inputs) with adaptive deep thinking, offering a 256K token context window and outputs up to 32K tokens. It sits in the Seed model catalog alongside the faster Seed 1.6 Flash variant and the newer Seed 2.0 generation.

Seed 1.6 is a hosted proprietary model served through ByteDance's Seed API and third-party providers such as OpenRouter, not an open-weight release. Third-party listings note it was scheduled for retirement from some providers in November 2026, so check current availability before building on it. The exact public launch date is not well documented, so the date below is era-level.