o4 mini vs Seed 2.0 Pro

o4 mini

OpenAI

OpenAI o4 mini, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a compact reasoning model from the o4 family that combines multimodal understanding with efficient chain-of-thought processing. It features a 200K token context window and native image understanding, with strong performance on mathematics and coding benchmarks relative to its inference cost. o4 mini targets cost-sensitive applications requiring both visual reasoning and mathematical accuracy.

ByteDance

Seed 2.0 Pro is ByteDance's flagship general-purpose model, released in February 2026 under the Doubao brand through the Volcengine API platform, developed by the company's Seed research team as a foundation for agentic applications requiring long-horizon reasoning and multimodal input comprehension. The model accepts text, images, and extended video — including hour-length recordings — targeting enterprise use cases in long-form document analysis, agentic coding (integrated with ByteDance's TRAE IDE), and multi-turn reasoning tasks. It anchors a three-tier product family alongside Seed 2.0 Lite and Mini, positioned as ByteDance's response to frontier model competition in the Chinese and global enterprise AI markets.