ByteDance Introduces Open-Source Model to Compete with AI Solutions from DeepSeek and Alibaba Cloud

August 21, 2025 Alex Parker

TikTok and Douyin, owned by ByteDance, has its Seed department overseeing AI research and large language model (LLM) development, has recently uploaded three versions of its Seed-OSS-36B open-source AI model to Hugging Face, the largest open-source AI development platform globally.

According to ByteDance, Seed-OSS-36B has been built with general-purpose and reasoning capabilities, featuring long-context window processing and various developer-friendly functionalities.

Despite its modest size of 36 billion parameters—internal variables utilized during training for performance enhancement—Seed-OSS-36B demonstrates competitive abilities, as noted by the company. Open-source AI models from other Chinese firms often feature parameters that are significantly larger.

In light of recent benchmark tests, ByteDance stated that its new AI model either matched or outperformed the capabilities of similarly sized offerings from competitors, which include Alibaba Cloud, Google, and OpenAI, as well as its own Seed 1.6 model. Alibaba Cloud represents the AI and cloud computing segment of Alibaba Group Holding, the parent company of the South China Morning Post.

ByteDance’s Seed department oversees the social media giant’s artificial intelligence research and large language model development. Photo: Shutterstock

The launch of Seed-OSS-36B AI by ByteDance signifies that Chinese AI companies are progressively closing the gap with their US counterparts through an open-source methodology, which provides third-party developers access to modify and distribute the AI model’s source code.

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