Doubao Seed 2.0 Lite — cost-efficient Seed 2.0 variant.
Doubao-Seed-2.0-lite (Doubao Seed 2.0 Lite) is ByteDance's cost-efficient mid-tier model in the Seed 2.0 family, released February 14, 2026 via Volcano Engine. It is positioned between the flagship Pro variant and the ultra-light Mini, targeting balanced performance and throughput for production Agent workloads. The model ships with 131 k context and 32 k max completion and is fully OpenAI-compatible through api.therouter.ai/v1.
On May 6, 2026 the model received a significant upgrade that made it the first omni-modal understanding model in the Doubao family, adding native video, image, and audio understanding alongside text. Agent, coding, and GUI capabilities were also improved.
Omni-modal understanding: native video, image, and audio input alongside text, available directly through Volcano Engine.
Text in, text out. The omni-modal inputs are not routed here yet, so send text only.
| Type | Rate |
|---|---|
| Input | $0.270 / 1M tokens |
| Output | $2.16 / 1M tokens |
| Release date | 2026-02-14seed.bytedance.com ↗ | verified |
| Omni-modal upgrade date | 2026-05-06www.yicai.com ↗ | verified |
| License | Proprietary (Volcano Engine API) | verified |
| Training cutoff | Not publicly disclosed | unknown |
Use the global api.therouter.ai endpoint shown below for new integrations; the legacy China accelerated endpoint is retired.
curl https://api.therouter.ai/v1/chat/completions -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer $THE_ROUTER_API_KEY" -d '{
"model": "doubao/doubao-seed-2-0-lite",
"messages": [
{"role": "user", "content": "Summarize the key points from this input."}
]
}'curl https://api.therouter.ai/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $THEROUTER_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"doubao/doubao-seed-2-0-lite","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'Volcano Engine announced native unified understanding of video, image, audio and text, plus Agent/Coding/GUI capability improvements. The upgrade positions Lite as the most cost-effective omni-modal option in the Seed 2.0 lineup.
Seed 2.0 Pro, Lite, Mini and Code variants launched simultaneously on Volcano Engine API. Pro claims frontier-level results on multimodal, math and coding benchmarks at ~10× lower token price than Western frontier models.
No. The May 2026 omni-modal upgrade is currently only available via direct Volcano Engine endpoints. TheRouter's standard-models.yaml still lists the model as text-only. Operators who need video/audio understanding should call Volcano Engine directly or wait for TheRouter to expose the expanded modality.
Lite sits between Mini (lowest cost, lowest latency, high-QPS edge) and Pro (strongest reasoning, highest cost). It offers the best balance for most production Agent workloads that need more capability than Mini but do not justify Pro pricing.
| source | URL | retrieved | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Release date | seed.bytedance.com ↗ | 2026-05-25 | verified |
| Omni-modal upgrade date | www.yicai.com ↗ | 2026-05-25 | verified |
| License | — | — | verified |
| Training cutoff | — | — | unknown |
| Doubao-Seed-2.0-lite upgraded to first omni-modal model in Doubao family | yicai.com ↗ | 2026-05-25 | verified |
| ByteDance releases Seed 2.0 series — Pro positioned against GPT-5.2 / Gemini 3 Pro | seed.bytedance.com ↗ | 2026-05-25 | verified |
| Does Doubao-Seed-2.0-lite support native video or audio understanding through TheRouter? | www.yicai.com ↗ | 2026-05-25 | to verify |
| How does Seed 2.0 Lite compare to Seed 2.0 Mini and Pro in cost/performance? | seed.bytedance.com ↗ | 2026-05-25 | to verify |