ByteDance unveiled the Doubao Seed 2.1 model family at the Volcano Engine FORCE conference on June 23, 2026, releasing two API tiers: Seed 2.1 Pro, targeting complex multi-step agent and coding workflows, and Seed 2.1 Turbo, a faster, lower-cost variant for high-volume production.
Benchmark results
According to ByteDance, Seed 2.1 Pro achieves top scores on GDPVal, Agents’ Last Exam (ALE), and MobileWorld — benchmarks designed to measure how well a model completes multi-step, real-world tasks rather than isolated prompts. The model also leads on video understanding tests including TVBench and TOMATO, and produced a 16% reduction in average steps needed to complete GUI automation tasks, which ByteDance attributes to reinforcement learning applied during training.
Multiple independent evaluators have placed Seed 2.1 alongside GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7, and Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding, agent execution, and multimodal understanding — a comparison ByteDance has not disputed.
Scale and market position
The Doubao platform now processes 180 trillion tokens per day, a 1,500-fold increase from its 1.2 billion daily-token baseline in May 2024. IDC data released the same day shows Volcano Engine holds a 49.5% share of the Chinese public cloud Model-as-a-Service market, ahead of Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Baidu.
Pricing and access
API pricing for Seed 2.1 Pro is 6 yuan per million input tokens and 30 yuan per million output tokens; Turbo costs half as much — 3 yuan input and 15 yuan output per million tokens. Consumer access through the Doubao app remains free for everyday chat and search. ByteDance said Seed 2.1 will roll out to Feishu Spark and Coze within two weeks.