ByteDance unleashes open-source AI model to challenge DeepSeek, Alibaba Cloud

TikTok and Douyin owner ByteDance’s Seed department, which oversees the tech unicorn’s AI research and large language model (LLM) development, has uploaded three variants of its Seed-OSS-36B open-source AI model to Hugging Face, the world’s largest open-source AI developer platform.

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.

Citing recent benchmark tests, ByteDance said its new AI model either matched or surpassed the capabilities of similar-sized offerings from competitors including Alibaba Cloud, Google and OpenAI, as well as the firm’s own Seed 1.6 model. Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding, owner 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

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.

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