ByteDance
Foundation Models
About ByteDance
ByteDance runs one of the largest AI operations in the world through its Seed research organisation, and is unusual in reaching enormous consumer scale before Western attention caught up. Its Doubao assistant is China's most used AI chatbot at roughly 155 million weekly active users, and the Seed model family was processing more than 180 trillion tokens a day as of June 2026. The same models power CapCut's generative video features and Dreamina, giving it a distribution advantage few labs have: hundreds of millions of people already inside its apps.
Company History
Founded 2012, reaching global scale with TikTok and Douyin before turning that distribution towards AI. The Seed research organisation now produces the Doubao model family. Doubao Seed 2.0 shipped 14 February 2026 and Seed 2.1 on 23 June 2026, the latter aimed at multi-step agent workflows and end-to-end coding. SeedRealtime followed on 5 August 2026: a full-duplex audio-visual model that processes continuous audio, video and text while listening and responding at the same time.
AI Models & Benchmarks
3 modelsDoubao Seed 2.1
Flagship model aimed at real-world agent work: multi-step planning, document processing, and more stable end-to-end coding delivery.
Doubao Seed 2.0
Powers the Doubao assistant, China's most used AI chatbot at roughly 155 million weekly active users.
SeedRealtime
Native full-duplex audio-visual model that listens and responds simultaneously across continuous audio, video and text streams.
Products & Services
8- Doubao
- Seed model family
- SeedRealtime
- CapCut
- Dreamina
- TikTok
- Douyin
- Volcano Engine
People & ecosystem
Key People
- Liang Rubo (CEO)
- Zhang Yiming (Founder)
Competitive Landscape
- Alibaba
- DeepSeek
- Moonshot AI
- Zhipu AI
- Kuaishou
- OpenAI