Seed 2.0 Pro fits research and engineering teams needing frontier math and video reasoning from a budget-friendly Asia-Pacific vendor, backed by a 3020 Codeforces rating near International Master level. It is the wrong pick for teams that need enterprise SLAs on AWS Bedrock or Azure, since ByteDance's API infrastructure runs primarily through Volcengine and BytePlus instead.
Seed 2.0 Pro is ByteDance's flagship omni-modal foundation model, released February 14, 2026 and scoring 98.3 on AIME math reasoning. It processes audio and video natively in the same request as text and images, without a separate transcription or captioning step, and powers the flagship tier of ByteDance's Doubao consumer app and TRAE coding environment.
Where it sits
- $0.945/M$ per 1M tokensBlended price (3:1)Lower is better#25 / 64peer median $1.70/Mvendor price, checked by HokAI
- --tokens/sOutput speedHigher is better-- / 39peer median 90 tok/scited: Artificial Analysis
- 76.5%% solvedSWE-bench VerifiedHigher is better#17 / 28peer median 78.3%per source, see benchmark scores
- 88.9%% correctGPQA DiamondHigher is better#21 / 44peer median 88.3%per source, see benchmark scores
Priced around the middle of the 64 GA models with a published price (rank 25), mid-pack on SWE-bench Verified (rank 17 of 28), and one of 65 whose vendor states it does not train on customer data.
Ranks are against GA models on HokAI that publish the same figure; ties share a rank.
Provider: ByteDance · Family: Seed 2.0
Context window: 272,000 tokens · Max output: 131,072
Input modalities: text, image, audio, video · Output: text, tool-calls
About Seed 2.0 Pro
Seed 2.0 Pro is ByteDance's flagship general-purpose omni-modal agent model, released February 14, 2026 as the first model in the Seed foundation series to natively unify text, image, audio, and video understanding in a single inference pass. It uses a Transformer backbone with a Mixture-of-Experts design following the pattern of the wider Seed family, though ByteDance has not disclosed exact parameter counts for the Pro variant. The Seed 2.0 series is a generational step up from Seed 1.5, which introduced Seed1.5-Thinking for chain-of-thought reasoning and Seed1.5-VL for vision-language work with 20B active MoE parameters; Seed 2.0 Pro folds both of those strengths into one unified system and sits above the Seed 2.0 Lite and Mini variants that power lower tiers of the Doubao app.
ByteDance has not published an independent needle-in-haystack evaluation of Seed 2.0 Pro's context handling, but the company specifically highlights coherent reasoning over hour-long footage with streaming analysis. The companion Seed 2.0 Lite variant confirms a 262,144-token context and 131,072-token max output, and ByteDance upgraded Lite again in late April 2026, though no Pro-specific patch has been documented since the February launch.
Audio input needs no separate transcription step before the model reasons over it, and the Seed 2.0 series documentation references GUI operation capability for agent workflows alongside standard function calling. Output is limited to text and tool-calls: image, audio, and video generation live in ByteDance's separate Seedance and Seedream models, not in Seed 2.0 Pro itself.
API access runs through Volcengine (ByteDance's China cloud), BytePlus (international enterprise), OpenRouter, and DeepInfra, with no AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, or Azure listing and no open weights available. ByteDance has not published a system card comparable to Anthropic's or Google's, and named red-teaming partners are not disclosed; SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and HIPAA certification status for BytePlus remain unconfirmed, so regulated-industry teams should run a direct enterprise agreement review before deploying it.
Pricing
$0.47 per 1M input tokens and $2.37 per 1M output tokens via Volcengine reference pricing. BytePlus international pricing may vary. No prompt caching tier confirmed as of February 2026.
What a real job costs
| Job | Input | Output | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Summarise a 20-page PDF | $0.014 | $0.0024 | $0.016 |
| Support reply | $0.0009 | $0.0007 | $0.0017 |
| One coding agent run | $0.094 | $0.047 | $0.141 |
Budgets: 20-page PDF = 30k in / 1k out · Support reply = 2k in / 300 out · Coding agent run = 200k in / 20k out. Computed from the vendor's per-token prices at render time; cached-input discounts are not applied.
Key Features
- Omni-Modal Input Processing: Reads text, images, spoken audio, and video clips together in one API call, without routing audio through a separate speech-to-text step first.
- 88.9 GPQA Diamond Science Score: Scores 88.9 on GPQA Diamond, keeping pace with frontier rivals on graduate-level physics, chemistry, and biology questions.
- 3020 Codeforces Rating: Reaches a 3020 Codeforces rating, approaching International Master level on algorithmic contest problems.
- 272K-Token Context Window: Handles up to 272K tokens of input and 131,072 tokens of output, enough for hour-long video or large codebases in one prompt.
- 89.5 VideoMME Video Understanding: Scores 89.5 on VideoMME and ranks 3rd on the LMSYS Vision Arena for video-native tasks as of February 2026.
Pros
- Places among the top few models globally for competition math and graduate-level science reasoning on ByteDance's own AIME and GPQA Diamond results.
- Scores 89.5 on VideoMME with hour-long streaming video analysis, one of the stronger native video results published for a 2026 frontier model.
- Costs a fraction of GPT-5 or Claude Opus 4.8 per token for comparable reasoning benchmarks, based on Volcengine's published rate card.
Cons
- API infrastructure is primarily China-based (Volcengine) with thinner enterprise SLA coverage in the US and EU than AWS Bedrock or Azure OpenAI.
- No confirmed prompt caching, which raises costs for repeat-context agent loops compared to Anthropic's 90% cached input discount.
- Training data cutoff of January 2024 is older than most 2025-2026 frontier releases, requiring retrieval augmentation for current events.
Benchmarks
- MMLU-Pro: 87% vendor-reported · 14 Feb 2026 — A harder version of the 57-subject knowledge exam, % correct.
- AIME 2025: 98.3% vendor-reported · 14 Feb 2026 — Competition-level maths problems from the 2025 exam, % solved.
- Video Mme: 89.5 vendor-reported · 14 Feb 2026
- GPQA Diamond: 88.9% vendor-reported · 14 Feb 2026 — PhD-level science questions that are hard to search for, % correct.
- LMArena rank: #6 vendor-reported · 14 Feb 2026 — Position on the blind human-preference leaderboard; #1 is best.
- Codeforces Rating: 3,020 vendor-reported · 14 Feb 2026
- SWE-bench Verified: 76.5% vendor-reported · 14 Feb 2026 — Real GitHub issues fixed end to end, % solved.
A benchmark is an exam, not the job. Scores transfer unevenly between tasks, so weigh the one closest to your workload and read every figure with its source.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Seed 2.0 Pro actually cost?
Volcengine charges $0.47 for every 1M input tokens, plus $2.37 for every 1M output tokens, as its official February 2026 reference rate; BytePlus international pricing runs slightly higher. There is no confirmed batch discount or prompt-caching tier, so a daily coding agent using 1M input and 200K output tokens costs about $0.94, and a 100K-token document analysis runs about $0.05.
Can you use Seed 2.0 Pro without paying?
No, Seed 2.0 Pro has no free tier. Every request through Volcengine, BytePlus, OpenRouter, or DeepInfra is billed per token starting with the first call, and ByteDance has not published any trial-credit program for new developers.
What are Seed 2.0 Pro's closest competitors?
GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.8 lead the Western frontier field, both offering steadier enterprise SLA support on AWS Bedrock or Azure than Seed 2.0 Pro gets through Volcengine and BytePlus. DeepSeek V4 Pro stands out as the strongest option for teams wanting to self-host MIT-licensed weights rather than call a proprietary API. Qwen3.7-Max is a further Asia-Pacific agent model worth checking against ByteDance's pricing tier.
How does Seed 2.0 Pro compare to GPT-5 in 2026?
Seed 2.0 Pro edges out GPT-5 on raw coding accuracy, scoring 76.5 on SWE-bench Verified against GPT-5's 74.9, and costs less per token on both input and output. GPT-5 still wins on ecosystem maturity, with native availability on Azure and AWS Bedrock that Seed 2.0 Pro's Volcengine-first infrastructure does not match. For math-heavy workloads, Seed 2.0 Pro's competition-level reasoning scores lead most Western rivals' published results, though ByteDance has not released independent verification for all of its benchmark claims.
How do you set up Seed 2.0 Pro?
Sign up for Volcengine or BytePlus, pull an API key out of the Ark console, then point your existing agent framework at the endpoint the same way you would any other model provider. Skipping the account-creation step is possible too: OpenRouter and DeepInfra both proxy Seed 2.0 Pro under their own key management and OpenAI-style formatting.
Top Alternatives
- GPT-5: Pick Seed 2.0 Pro for a lower per-token rate and a slight coding-benchmark edge; pick GPT-5 for native Azure or AWS Bedrock hosting instead of Volcengine.
- Claude Opus 4.8: Pick Claude Opus 4.8 for the highest agentic coding accuracy and a full 1M-token context window; pick Seed 2.0 Pro if per-token cost matters more than topping the coding leaderboard.
- DeepSeek V4 Pro: Pick DeepSeek V4 Pro for open MIT-licensed weights you can self-host; pick Seed 2.0 Pro for native audio and video input handled in the same API call.