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ByteDance

ByteDance is a Chinese internet company founded in 2012, whose AI work includes the Doubao chatbot, the TRAE coding tool, the Seed model team and the Volcano Engine cloud platform.[^1]

Founded 2012Website bytedance.com Era Deep learning

2025 · 15 20232026
Events per year
21Models & products22Events2People

What it is

ByteDance is a Chinese internet company founded in March 2012 by Zhang Yiming and Liang Rubo. It is headquartered in Haidian, Beijing, and its holding entity, ByteDance Ltd, is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.[1] A South China Morning Post headline describes the company as the owner of TikTok.[6]

The company's scale is reported in a few figures. The Wall Street Journal put its valuation at about $300 billion in November 2024. Wikipedia lists 2025 revenue of about US$200 billion and roughly 120,000 employees. Bloomberg reported in December 2025 that ByteDance was on track for about $50 billion in profit for 2025.[1]

Origins

Zhang Yiming was chairman and chief executive from 2012 until 2021, when Liang Rubo took over as chief executive. Zhang announced the change in May 2021 and formally stepped down on 4 November 2021.[1][2]

ByteDance set up an AI Lab in March 2016, headed by Wei-Ying Ma, a former assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia.[1] Volcano Engine (Volcengine) was founded in 2021 as ByteDance's cloud-computing unit. In June 2023 it unveiled Volcano Ark, an AI model service platform.[1][3]

The large-model team, called Seed, was established in 2023.[1] Its consumer chatbot Doubao launched in August 2023 as an invitation test on the web, iOS and Android. The underlying model debuted at the same time under the name Skylark.[4][5]

Main features

ByteDance's model lines include the proprietary Seed LLMs and the open-source Seed-OSS. They also include the Seedream models for text-to-image generation and editing, the Seedance video models, and OmniHuman-1, released in February 2025, which animates a single image using motion signals.[1]

On 15 May 2024 Volcano Engine launched the Doubao model family in Beijing and priced its main enterprise model far below rivals. Media described this as the start of a price war among Chinese large language model providers.[5][6] Daily token usage of the Doubao models topped 4 trillion by late 2024, a 33-fold increase since the May 2024 launch. By April 2026 China Daily reported about 120 trillion tokens processed per day.[9][10]

In February 2025 former Google DeepMind vice president Wu Yonghui joined as head of foundational research for Seed, reporting directly to chief executive Liang Rubo. Zhu Wenjia continued to lead Seed's model-application work.[7]

TRAE, the company's AI coding product, launched in January 2025 and reported 6 million registered users in nearly 200 countries by the end of 2025.[8]

Its place in AI development

In December 2023 The Verge reported that ByteDance had used OpenAI's API in building its own model. OpenAI suspended the account pending an investigation. ByteDance said its use was licensed and that it had deleted ChatGPT-generated training data.[1]

On 12 March 2026 it was reported that ByteDance was working with Aolani Cloud to deploy about 500 Nvidia Blackwell systems, roughly 36,000 B200 chips, in Malaysia.[1]

The video model Seedance 2.0, released in February 2026, drew copyright complaints from the Motion Picture Association and Hollywood studios.[1][11]

CapabilitiesLarge language models

TechniquesFoundation models

ApplicationsConsumer apps

Ecosystem & regionChinaCloud

20265

  1. ReleaseByteDance releases Seedance 2.5

    ByteDance released Seedance 2.5 in July 2026. The model generates up to 30 seconds of video per pass, offers a beta long-video mode, and can edit part of a scene without regenerating the whole clip. It is offered through an API.

  2. ReleaseByteDance releases Seed2.1

    On 23 June 2026 ByteDance Seed announced Seed2.1 for Doubao and Volcano Engine users. It has Pro and Turbo models for productivity work and builds on Seed2.0.

  3. UpdateTRAE splits into TRAE Work and TRAE IDE

    On 9 June 2026 TRAE renamed its standalone SOLO agent as TRAE Work, an AI workspace for product managers, analysts, marketers and others. TRAE IDE stayed as the product for developers.

  4. ReleaseByteDance releases Doubao-Seed-2.0

    On 14 February 2026 ByteDance released the Doubao-Seed-2.0 series in the Doubao app and on Volcano Engine, with Pro, Lite and Mini general agent models. Seed2.0 Pro was positioned against GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro.

  5. ReleaseByteDance releases Seedance 2.0, prompting a Hollywood copyright backlash

    ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 video model went live on 12 February 2026. Viral clips drew copyright complaints from the Motion Picture Association and Hollywood studios, and ByteDance later paused the global launch, according to The Information.

202515

  1. ReleaseVolcano Engine releases Doubao Large Model 1.8 and Seedance 1.5 pro

    On 18 December 2025, at its FORCE conference, Volcano Engine released Doubao Large Model 1.8 and the audio-video generation model Seedance 1.5 pro, along with agent tools and an AI savings plan.

  2. ReleaseByteDance releases UI-TARS-2

    ByteDance Seed posted the UI-TARS-2 technical report on 2 September 2025 and released it on GitHub on 4 September. It was trained with multi-turn reinforcement learning.

  3. ReleaseByteDance Seed releases Seedream 4.0

    ByteDance Seed released Seedream 4.0 in September 2025, with text-to-image generation, image editing and multi-image composition in one model, producing images from 1K to 4K.

  4. ReleaseByteDance Seed open-sources Seed-OSS-36B under Apache-2.0

    On 20 August 2025 ByteDance Seed released the Seed-OSS-36B models on Hugging Face under Apache-2.0. The 36B models were trained on 12T tokens and support a native context of up to 512K tokens.

  5. UpdateTRAE introduces the SOLO autonomous coding mode

    On 17 July 2025 TRAE announced SOLO, an autonomous coding mode that drafts a spec, then plans, builds and ships features. SOLO became generally available on 4 November 2025 with SOLO Coder and SOLO Builder.

  6. ReleaseByteDance Seed releases the Seedance 1.0 video model

    ByteDance Seed published the Seedance 1.0 technical report on 10 June 2025 and announced the model on 11 June. It generates 1080p video from text or images and ranked first on two Artificial Analysis leaderboards.

  7. ReleaseVolcano Engine launches Doubao 1.6 (Seed1.6) at its FORCE conference

    On 11 June 2025 Volcano Engine released Doubao Large Model 1.6, known as Seed1.6, a mixture-of-experts model with a 256K context window and a Thinking variant that scored 683 on the humanities paper of the 2025 Shandong gaokao.

  8. ReleaseByteDance Seed open-sources Seed-Coder

    On 8 May 2025 ByteDance Seed released Seed-Coder, a family of 8B-parameter open code models under the MIT license, with Base, Instruct and Reasoning variants.

  9. ReleaseByteDance releases UI-TARS-1.5 and open-sources its 7B model

    On 16 April 2025 ByteDance Seed shared UI-TARS-1.5 and open-sourced its 7B model. The full model scored 42.5 on OSWorld, while the open 7B version scored 27.5.

  10. ReleaseByteDance Seed releases the Seedream 3.0 image model

    On 15 April 2025 ByteDance Seed posted the Seedream 3.0 technical report. It is a Chinese-English bilingual image model that improves on Seedream 2.0 and generates images up to 2K.

  11. ReleaseByteDance Seed publishes the Seed-Thinking-v1.5 reasoning model

    On 10 April 2025 ByteDance Seed posted the technical report for Seed-Thinking-v1.5, a mixture-of-experts reasoning model with 20B activated and 200B total parameters, and a harder benchmark it built called BeyondAIME.

  12. HireFormer Google DeepMind VP Wu Yonghui joins ByteDance Seed

    Wu Yonghui, a former research vice president at Google DeepMind, reportedly joined ByteDance on 17 February 2025 to lead foundational research for the Seed large-model team, reporting directly to CEO Liang Rubo.

  13. ReleaseByteDance releases Doubao-1.5-pro

    On 22 January 2025 ByteDance released Doubao-1.5-pro, a closed multimodal model built on a sparse mixture-of-experts design, with a deep-thinking variant that was reported to beat OpenAI o1-preview on AIME.

  14. ReleaseByteDance open-sources the UI-TARS GUI agent model

    On 21 January 2025 ByteDance Seed researchers posted the UI-TARS paper. UI-TARS is a GUI agent that reads only screenshots and operates a computer with keyboard and mouse, and its weights were released openly.

  15. ReleaseByteDance launches the TRAE AI coding tool

    ByteDance's AI coding tool TRAE launched in January 2025. By the end of 2025 it had 6 million registered users, and its open-source Trae Agent reported 75.20% on SWE-bench Verified, first on the leaderboard.

20241

  1. ReleaseVolcano Engine launches the Doubao model family and cuts LLM prices

    On 15 May 2024 Volcano Engine, ByteDance's cloud unit, launched the Doubao model family and priced its main model far below rivals, starting a price war in China's enterprise AI market.

20231

  1. ReleaseByteDance begins testing the Doubao chatbot and its Skylark model

    In August 2023 a ByteDance subsidiary opened its Doubao chatbot for invitation testing, built on a model called Skylark that was among the first LLMs to pass China's algorithm registry.

Models and products over time

21
  1. 2023
    • Aug 2023 Doubao Product

      Doubao is ByteDance's AI chatbot, opened for invitation testing in August 2023 and later offering text, image and voice generation, AI search and video generation.[^1][^2]

    • Aug 2023 Skylark (Yunque) Model

      Skylark, or Yunque (云雀), is ByteDance's first large language model. Released in August 2023, it powered the Doubao chatbot and was relaunched in May 2024 as the Doubao model family.

  2. 2024
    • May 15, 2024 Doubao model family (Doubao Pro, 2024) Model

      ByteDance's Doubao model family, launched through Volcano Engine in May 2024, offered general-purpose, speech and image models at prices far below rivals, helping set off a price war among Chinese providers.

  3. 2025
    • Jan 2025 TRAE Agent

      TRAE is ByteDance's AI coding product, launched in January 2025 with an IDE, a plugin and the SOLO agent. Its SOLO agent was renamed TRAE Work in June 2026.[^1][^9]

    • Jan 21, 2025 UI-TARS Model

      UI-TARS is a GUI agent model from ByteDance Seed: it takes only screenshots as input and outputs keyboard and mouse actions, reported state-of-the-art results on more than 10 benchmarks, and was released with open weights under Apache-2.0.

    • Jan 22, 2025 Doubao-1.5-pro Model

      Doubao-1.5-pro, released by ByteDance on 22 January 2025, is a closed multimodal model built on a sparse mixture-of-experts design. It was offered through Volcano Engine at low API prices.

    • Apr 10, 2025 Seed-Thinking-v1.5 Model

      Seed-Thinking-v1.5 is a reasoning model from ByteDance Seed: a 20B-activated, 200B-total mixture-of-experts model trained with reinforcement learning to think before answering, published with a technical report and benchmark tables but no model weights.

    • Apr 15, 2025 Seedream 3.0 Model

      Seedream 3.0 is ByteDance Seed's Chinese–English image-generation foundation model of 2025, improving on Seedream 2.0 in prompt alignment, Chinese text rendering and native 2K output. Seedream 4.0 succeeded it in September 2025.

    • Apr 16, 2025 UI-TARS-1.5 Model

      ByteDance Seed's GUI agent model from April 2025 and the successor to UI-TARS. Its 7B version is open-source under Apache-2.0, and the family reports state-of-the-art results on several screen-control benchmarks.

    • May 8, 2025 Seed-Coder Model

      Seed-Coder is a family of open code models released by ByteDance Seed in May 2025, with 8B-parameter Base, Instruct and Reasoning variants trained on data filtered by language models rather than hand-written rules.

    • Jun 11, 2025 Seed1.6 (Doubao-Seed-1.6) Model

      ByteDance Seed's general-purpose model series, announced on 11 June 2025 as Doubao Large Model 1.6, combining multimodal input, a 256K context window and a mode that decides per prompt whether to reason before answering.

    • Jun 11, 2025 Seedance 1.0 Model

      Seedance 1.0 is a video-generation model from ByteDance Seed, announced in June 2025. One model handles text-to-video and image-to-video, produces 1080p multi-shot clips, and ranked first on two Artificial Analysis leaderboards.

    • Aug 20, 2025 Seed-OSS-36B Model

      ByteDance Seed's open-weight 36-billion-parameter model family from August 2025, trained on 12 trillion tokens with a 512K-token context window and a user-settable thinking budget.

    • Sep 2025 Seedream 4.0 Model

      Seedream 4.0 is ByteDance Seed's image model released in September 2025, which puts text-to-image generation, image editing and multi-image composition into a single architecture and can output images from 1K up to 4K resolution.

    • Sep 4, 2025 UI-TARS-2 Model

      UI-TARS-2 is a GUI agent trained with multi-turn reinforcement learning and released in September 2025 as an all-in-one upgrade to UI-TARS-1.5, with benchmark scores across web, desktop, Android, games and software-engineering tasks.

    • Dec 18, 2025 Doubao-Seed-1.8 Model

      Doubao Large Model 1.8 (Doubao-Seed-1.8) is ByteDance's Volcano Engine flagship released on 18 December 2025. It is built for multimodal agent tasks, with stronger tool calling and computer-operation abilities.

    • Dec 18, 2025 Seedance 1.5 pro Model

      An audio-video generation model from Volcano Engine, announced on 18 December 2025, that produces picture, voices, music and ambient sound together and keeps them in millisecond-level sync.

  4. 2026
    • Feb 12, 2026 Seedance 2.0 Model

      ByteDance's video generation model released in February 2026, built to produce picture and sound together from text, image, audio or video inputs, and known for a copyright dispute that paused its global rollout.

    • Feb 14, 2026 Seed2.0 (Doubao-Seed-2.0) Model

      Seed2.0 is ByteDance's February 2026 Doubao model series, offered in three agent-oriented sizes with low token pricing and reported benchmark results.

    • Jun 23, 2026 Seed2.1 (Doubao Seed 2.1) Model

      ByteDance Seed's Seed2.1, released in June 2026 in Pro and Turbo versions, is a Doubao-family model aimed at real productivity work, with reported gains in agent ability, coding, knowledge, reasoning and multimodal understanding.

    • Jul 31, 2026 Seedance 2.5 Model

      Seedance 2.5, released by ByteDance in July 2026, is an audio-video joint generation model that makes clips of up to 30 seconds per pass, accepts many multimodal references, and supports editing parts of a scene without regenerating the whole clip.

People2

Zhang Yiming2012–Wu Yonghui2025–

Notes and sources

  1. ByteDancehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance
  2. Zhang Yiminghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Yiming
  3. ByteDance's Volcengine unveils AI model service platform Volcano Arkhttps://technode.com/2023/06/29/bytedances-volcengine-unveils-ai-model-service-platform-volcano-ark/
  4. ByteDance's subsidiary tests its AI robot Doubaohttps://technode.com/2023/08/18/bytedances-subsidiary-tests-its-ai-robot-doubao/
  5. ByteDance's Volcano Engine Starts Price War in China's Enterprise LLMs Sectorhttps://yicaiglobal.com/news/bytedances-volcano-engine-starts-price-war-in-chinas-enterprise-llms-sector
  6. TikTok owner ByteDance launches low-cost Doubao AI models for enterprises, initiating price war in crowded markethttps://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3262781/tiktok-owner-bytedance-launches-low-cost-doubao-ai-models-enterprises-initiating-price-war-crowded
  7. Former Google DeepMind VP joins ByteDance as Seed team research leadhttps://technode.com/2025/02/24/former-google-deepmind-vp-joins-bytedance-as-seed-team-research-lead/
  8. TRAE 2025 Unwrappedhttps://www.trae.ai/blog/trae_2025_yearly_review
  9. ByteDance launches Doubao-1.5 Pro, maintains positive gross margins despite low pricinghttps://en.jiemian.com/article/12282946.html
  10. Doubaohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubao
  11. Seedancehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seedance_2.0

Cite this page: ByteDance. TellWorld, https://www.tellworld.net/companies/bytedance. Updated 2026-11-08