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Seed 1.6

Seed 1.6 is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 23B active parameters out of 230B total, a context window of 256K tokens, and three reasoning modes including adaptive chain-of-thought (CoT) that calibrates thinking depth to question complexity.

ReasoningTool UseImplicit Cachingtiered-cost
index.ts
import { streamText } from 'ai'


const result = streamText({
  model: 'bytedance/seed-1.6',
  prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?'
})
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Frequently Asked Questions

  • What are the three reasoning modes in Seed 1.6 and when should I use each?

    The three modes are FullCoT, NoCoT, and AdaCoT. FullCoT generates an extended chain-of-thought trace before answering, best for complex multi-step problems. NoCoT skips the reasoning trace for direct, low-latency responses. AdaCoT selects between the two based on estimated question difficulty, making it the practical default for mixed workloads.

  • Does Seed 1.6 support image inputs?

    Yes. Seed 1.6 incorporates Vision-Language Model (VLM) capabilities. You can process both text and visual data in the same request.

  • What is parallel decoding in the context of Seed 1.6?

    It's a training-free inference enhancement that generates additional thinking tokens without changing the base model weights. It deepens reasoning capacity at inference time, yielding eight-point improvements on the BeyondAIME benchmark.

  • How does the sparse MoE architecture affect cost?

    Only 23B of the 230B total parameters activate per forward pass. Inference compute stays closer to a 23B dense model than a 230B one. This lowers per-token cost while retaining the representational capacity of the full parameter count.

  • What academic benchmarks were used to evaluate Seed 1.6?

    ByteDance evaluated Seed 1.6 on China's 2025 Gaokao (683/750 in humanities, ranked first; 648/750 in science, ranked second, rising to 676/750 with higher-resolution images) and India's JEE Advanced entrance exam (top-10 placement, 100% math accuracy across five sampling rounds). See https://console.byteplus.com/ark/region:ark+ap-southeast-1/model/detail?Id=seed-1-6 for the full tables.

  • Is Seed 1.6 available for commercial use through AI Gateway?

    Yes. You can access Seed 1.6 through bytedance via AI Gateway with an API key or OIDC token. You don't manage upstream provider credentials yourself.