Imagine discovering a restaurant that matches a Michelin-starred kitchen — at fast-food prices.
The Quiet Disruption
A new contender just matched the best models
at a fraction of the cost
Think of benchmarks like standardized tests for AI — imperfect, but the common yardstick everyone uses.
The Scoreboard
How Seed2.0 Pro stacks up against GPT-5.2, Claude Opus, and Gemini-3-Pro across reasoning, code, math, and general benchmarks — including , , , and .
Codeforces Elo uses an absolute rating scale (higher is better); other benchmarks are accuracy percentages.
Seed2.0 Pro leads in 4 of 6 key benchmarks, with particularly strong showings in competitive programming (3020 Elo) and math olympiad tasks (94.2% AIME 2025).
Why should I care? This is why the team evaluating AI vendors for your company can now include a provider that was barely on the radar six months ago.
It's like discovering two airlines fly the same route with the same legroom — but one charges 10x less.
The Price Gap
Frontier-level performance shouldn't require a frontier-level budget. See how Seed2.0 Pro compares to equivalent models — and how much you'd actually save at real usage volumes.
Calculated assuming 60% input / 40% output token split at published per-million-token rates.
Full Model Pricing Breakdown
| Model | Provider | Input $/1M | Output $/1M |
|---|---|---|---|
Seed2.0 ProNEW | ByteDance | $0.47 | $2.57 |
Seed2.0 LiteNEW | ByteDance | $0.09 | $0.53 |
Seed2.0 MiniNEW | ByteDance | $0.03 | $0.31 |
GPT-5.2 High | OpenAI | $1.75 | $14.00 |
Claude Opus 4.5 | Anthropic | $5.00 | $25.00 |
Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Anthropic | $3.00 | $15.00 |
Gemini-3-Pro High | $3.00 | $15.00 |
Why should I care? If your product makes 50M API calls a month, the difference between Seed2.0 Pro and Claude Opus is the difference between a $130k bill and a $1.4M bill. That's not a rounding error — it's a hiring decision.
Like choosing between a sports car, sedan, and scooter — same manufacturer, different price-performance tradeoffs for different needs.
Three Tiers, One Architecture
ByteDance ships one coherent model family. Every tier shares the same underlying architecture — but is tuned for a distinct point on the cost-vs-capability curve.
Seed2.0 Pro
Frontier accuracy, competitive pricing
Highlights
- 94.2% AIME 2025
- 3020 Codeforces Elo
- 76.5% SWE-Bench Verified
- IMO 2025 Gold Medal
Use Cases
- Advanced code generation & debugging
- Mathematical & scientific reasoning
- Complex multi-step analysis
- Research synthesis & long-form writing
Which tier is right for you?
Follow this decision tree to find your match in under 10 seconds.
Prices shown are input / output per 1M tokens.
Why should I care? Most AI vendors force you to choose between premium quality and affordable scale — you rarely get both. A tiered family from a single provider means you can mix models within one product without changing infrastructure.
Most AI models are like calculators that only handle numbers. Seed2.0 reads documents, watches videos, and uses tools — more like a research assistant than a calculator.
Beyond Text
Seed2.0 is a natively multimodal model — it processes text, images, video, and documents in a single unified system, with tool use built in from the ground up.
Text & Reasoning
Frontier-level language understanding, generation, and multi-step reasoning
- MMLU-Pro: 87.0%
- GPQA Diamond: 68.7%
- SimpleQA: 35.3%
Matches or exceeds GPT-5.2 on general knowledge benchmarks while offering deeper reasoning chains on complex analytical tasks.
Vision & Image
Image understanding, OCR, chart analysis, and visual reasoning
- MMMU: 74.0%
- MathVista: 76.4%
- ChartQA: strong
Particularly strong on document and chart understanding — critical for enterprise workflows involving financial reports and dashboards.
Video Understanding
Long-form video comprehension, temporal reasoning, and scene analysis
- Video-MME (w/o sub): 78.5%
- MLVU: 77.8%
- Long video support
Native video understanding without frame extraction — a capability gap in most competing models.
Document Processing
Long-context document analysis, extraction, and cross-reference
- 128K+ context window
- Multi-document synthesis
- Structured extraction
The combination of long context and strong extraction makes Seed2.0 particularly effective for legal, compliance, and research workflows.
Agentic & Tool Use
Function calling, multi-step tool use, and autonomous task completion
- τ-Bench airline: 53.5%
- τ-Bench retail: 67.1%
- SWE-Bench: 76.5%
76.5% on SWE-Bench Verified places Seed2.0 Pro among the top agentic coding models — capable of autonomous software engineering tasks.
Scientific & Math
Olympiad-level mathematics, scientific reasoning, and formal proofs
- AIME 2025: 94.2%
- IMO 2025: Gold (35/42)
- CMO 2025: Gold (114/126)
Gold medals at both IMO and CMO 2025 demonstrate genuine mathematical reasoning — not pattern matching.
Why should I care? The multimodal capabilities mean Seed2.0 can replace multiple specialized tools in your stack — vision, document processing, and tool use in a single API call.
Passing a written driving test is one thing. Safely driving millions of passengers every day is another.
Battle-Tested at Billion Scale
Seed2.0 isn't a research model — it's the backbone of Doubao, ByteDance's AI assistant deployed across hundreds of millions of daily active users on the Volcengine cloud platform.
Hundreds of Millions
Daily Active Users
via Doubao, ByteDance's AI assistant
99.9%+
Production Uptime
Enterprise-grade reliability
Global
API Availability
Volcengine cloud platform
Production Pipeline
User Query
Natural language input from Doubao users
Every interaction with Doubao — text, voice, image, video — enters as a raw user query. The system must handle hundreds of languages, typos, code snippets, and mixed modalities without degrading.
Model Routing
Intelligent tier selection (Pro/Lite/Mini)
Not every query needs the full Pro model. A fast routing layer dispatches lightweight requests to Seed2.0 Mini and heavier reasoning tasks to Seed2.0 Pro — shaving latency and cost across billions of calls.
Seed2.0 Inference
Model processes with optimized serving
The core inference pass runs on optimized GPU clusters tuned specifically for Seed2.0's architecture. Hardware-software co-optimization means milliseconds matter at this scale.
Safety & Filtering
Content safety and quality checks
A separate safety pipeline inspects outputs before delivery. At Doubao's volume, even a 0.001% failure rate affects thousands of users — so this layer is non-negotiable.
Response
Delivered to hundreds of millions of users
The final response reaches the end user in real time. End-to-end latency targets are measured in hundreds of milliseconds — not seconds — to keep Doubao competitive with human-speed conversation.
Lab vs. Production
Benchmark performance in a controlled lab environment and real-world production are fundamentally different challenges.
Why should I care? Production at hundreds of millions of DAU is the ultimate stress test. This isn't a research preview — it's infrastructure that ByteDance already depends on.
Benchmarks are practice exams. Math olympiads and programming contests are the real tournament — problems no one has seen before, under time pressure.
Gold Standard
How Seed2.0 Pro performs across six capability dimensions compared to GPT-5.2 and Claude Opus — and where it earns gold at the world's most demanding competitions.
IMO 2025
Gold Medal35/42
Gold ≥ 35
International Mathematical Olympiad — the most prestigious math competition in the world
CMO 2025
Gold Medal114/126
Gold ≥ 87
Chinese Mathematical Olympiad — national-level competition with tens of thousands of participants
ICPC Pass@8
1st Place73.02%
vs GPT-5.2: 65.08%
International Collegiate Programming Contest — algorithmic programming under time pressure
Putnam-200
1st Place35.5
vs Gemini-3-Pro: 26.5
William Lowell Putnam Competition — regarded as the hardest undergraduate math exam in North America
Why should I care? Gold medals at IMO and CMO, plus top ranking at ICPC, signal genuine mathematical reasoning — not just pattern matching on training data. This matters for any use case requiring logical rigor.
What This Means For You
Three scenarios. Practical next steps.
Building a Product
- 1
Start with Seed2.0 Lite for prototyping — at $0.09/M input tokens, you can iterate rapidly without budget anxiety
- 2
Use Pro for complex reasoning tasks (code gen, analysis) and Mini for high-volume classification/routing
- 3
The three-tier architecture lets you optimize cost per feature, not cost per model
- 4
Test against GPT-5.2 and Claude on your specific use cases — benchmark parity doesn't mean identical behavior on your data
4 of 6
Performance Parity
key benchmarks where Seed2.0 Pro leads or matches frontier models
~10x
Cost Advantage
cheaper than Claude Opus on input tokens, ~4x cheaper than GPT-5.2
100M+
Production Scale
daily active users already served through Doubao