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TikTok is making headlines again today after the White House joined the popular social media application — but its parent company ByteDance, a Chinese web giant, also had a surprise announcement up its sleeve.
The company’s Seed Team of AI researchers today released Seed-OSS-36B on AI code sharing website Hugging Face.
Seed-OSS-36B is new line of open source, large language models (LLM) designed for advanced reasoning, and developer-focused usability with a longer token context — that is, how much information the models can accept as inputs and then output in a single exchange — than many competing LLMs from U.S. tech companies, even leaders such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
The collection introduces three main variants:
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Seed-OSS-36B-Base with synthetic data
Seed-OSS-36B-Base without synthetic data
Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct
In releasing both synthetic and non-synthetic versions of the Seed-OSS-36B-Base model, the Seed Team sought to balance practical performance with research flexibility.
The synthetic-data variant, trained with additional instruction data, consistently delivers stronger scores on standard benchmarks and is intended as a higher-performing general-purpose option.
The non-synthetic model, by contrast, omits these augmentations, creating a cleaner foundation that avoids potential bias or distortion introduced by synthetic instruction data.
By providing both, the team gives applied users access to improved results while ensuring researchers retain a neutral baseline for studying post-training methods.
Meanwhile, the Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct model differs in that it is post-trained with instruction data to prioritize task execution and instruction following, rather than serving purely as a foundation model.
All three models are released under the Apache-2.0 license, allowing free use, modification, and redistribution by researchers and developers working for enterprises.
That means they can be used to power commercial applications, internal to a company or external/customer-facing, without paying ByteDance any licensing fees or for application programming interface (API) usage.
This continues the summer 2025 trend of Chinese companies shipping powerful open source models with OpenAI attempting to catch up with its own open source gpt-oss duet released earlier this month.
The Seed Team positions Seed-OSS for international applications, emphasizing versatility across reasoning, agent-like task execution, and multilingual settings.
The Seed Team, formed in 2023, has concentrated on building foundation models that can serve both research and applied use cases.
Design and core features
The architecture behind Seed-OSS-36B combines familiar design choices such as causal language modeling, grouped query attention, SwiGLU …