ByteDance unleashes open-source AI model to challenge DeepSeek, Alibaba Cloud
Seed-OSS-36B was designed with both general-purpose and reasoning capabilities, with support for long-context window processing and various developer-friendly features, ByteDance said in a statement.
Despite a modest size of 36 billion parameters – the internal variables used by the system during training to improve its performance – Seed-OSS-36B offered competitive capabilities, the company said. Open-source AI models released by other Chinese companies have parameters dozens of times larger.

ByteDance’s release of Seed-OSS-36B AI reflects how Chinese AI companies are continuing to narrow the gap with their US peers through the open-source approach, which makes the source code of AI models available for third-party developers to use, modify and distribute.