ByteDance Unveils Open Source Seed-OSS-36B Model for Developers

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has made a significant announcement that could impact the artificial intelligence landscape. On March 15, 2025, the company’s Seed Team released the Seed-OSS-36B, a new line of open-source large language models (LLMs), available on the AI code-sharing platform Hugging Face. Designed for advanced reasoning and usability, Seed-OSS-36B boasts a remarkable token context capacity, allowing it to process up to 512,000 tokens in a single exchange. This capability surpasses that of many competing models from leading U.S. tech companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic.

The Seed Team announced the release of three main variants: the Seed-OSS-36B-Base, Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct, and a non-synthetic version. The synthetic variant is trained with additional instruction data, enabling it to achieve superior scores on standard benchmarks, making it a high-performing general-purpose option. In contrast, the non-synthetic model offers a cleaner foundation, free from biases that can arise from synthetic data, thus preserving neutrality for research purposes.

Innovative Features and Specifications

The architecture of Seed-OSS-36B integrates several advanced design features, including causal language modeling and grouped query attention. Each model contains 36 billion parameters across 64 layers and supports a vocabulary of 155,000 tokens. Notably, the long-context capability allows for the processing of extensive documents and reasoning chains without performance degradation, effectively accommodating the length of about 1,600 pages of text, comparable to a Christian Bible.

Another innovative characteristic is the introduction of a “thinking budget,” which enables developers to dictate the extent of reasoning the model should undertake before arriving at an answer. This feature has emerged in other recent models, such as Nvidia’s Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2, also available on Hugging Face.

Benchmarks released with Seed-OSS-36B indicate that the Instruct variant performs at a state-of-the-art level across various tasks. The non-synthetic version, while slightly less competitive in some areas, excels in providing a clean, instruction-free baseline for experimentation, particularly outperforming its synthetic counterpart on the GPQA-D benchmark.

Accessibility and Deployment for Enterprises

Accessibility remains a focal point for the Seed Team. Developers can deploy Seed-OSS-36B using Hugging Face Transformers, with support for quantization in both 4-bit and 8-bit formats to optimize memory usage. Integration with vLLM facilitates scalable serving, and the Seed Team provides configuration examples and API server instructions to streamline deployment.

The models are released under the Apache-2.0 license, allowing developers and organizations to utilize, modify, and redistribute them freely without incurring licensing fees. This open-access approach is particularly appealing for enterprises looking to innovate without the constraints of restrictive licensing terms.

As ByteDance continues to position Seed-OSS-36B for international applications, the company emphasizes its versatility in reasoning, task execution, and multilingual capabilities. By offering high-performance models under an open license, the Seed Team has broadened the options available to enterprises, researchers, and developers alike.

In summary, the release of Seed-OSS-36B marks a strategic move by ByteDance to enhance its standing in the AI sector while providing tools that empower developers to create advanced applications without significant financial barriers. This development reflects a growing trend among Chinese companies to deliver powerful open-source models, fostering innovation in the global AI landscape.