- 🆕 ByteDance Seed's latest unified multimodal image generation model
- 🧠 Adds "deep thinking" capability ahead of image generation
- 🌐 Real-time online search enhances time-sensitive, contextual creation
- 🎯 All-round upgrade in understanding, reasoning, and generation per ByteDance
- 🔧 Lite line positioned for fast, creative output
- 💬 Companion edit variant handles image-editing tasks
- 🏢 Built by ByteDance's Seed research division
- 👁️ Stylized, illustrative range across the Seedream family
ByteDance is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Beijing's Haidian district, with an associated variable-interest entity incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Best known as a consumer internet operator at enormous scale, it has also become a significant…
Explore 4 more models by ByteDance →Seedream V5 Lite is the latest entry in ByteDance Seed's image-generation lineup, released in February 2026. ByteDance describes it as a unified multimodal image generation model endowed with "deep thinking" and online search capabilities, with an all-round upgrade in understanding, reasoning, and generation. The "deep thinking" pipeline lets the model reason before generating, while online search can pull real-time web knowledge into time-sensitive creations.
The model targets practical creative work across the Seedream family's stylized, illustrative range. ByteDance positions the Lite line for fast generation, and pairs it with a dedicated editing variant for image manipulation.
Compared to its same-family predecessor Seedream V4.5, the V5 Lite line adds the deep-thinking and online-search pipeline that earlier versions lacked. For editing tasks, the companion Seedream V5 Lite Edit model serves as the successor to Seedream V4.5 Edit within the same generational upgrade.
ByteDance reports improvements across core dimensions including understanding, reasoning, and generation, though no independently verified benchmark figures are available here.
This About section is AI-generated from public sources via VeniceStats + Venice inference, with no human editing. It may contain inaccuracies.
| Seller | Reputation↓ | Routing | $ / img | Categories | API |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Venice.ai Proxy 0x1f22…18c9 | 100.00 | #2 | $0.025 | image,creative | openai-images |
| ▲ Apex Ant 0x73b4…e736 | 91.01 | #1 | $0.02 | image,media | openai-images |
| D5V1N2 0xd5e7…7be0 | 33.17 | gated | $0.058 | image,creative,fast,router,fallback | openai-images |
"Best price" and the seller table are live AntSeed catalog data (advertised $/1M tokens — or $ per generated image for unit-billed image models — not settled amounts). Reputation = on-chain trust (0-100). "Routing" = the SDK's default buyer routing (what the VPR desktop app ships with): a trust ≥ 60 gate on the effective reputation, then cheapest-first among routable sellers; live failover state (per-peer cooldowns) is buyer-side runtime and not included. Model knowledge (TLDR, provider, About) via the VeniceStats enrichment layer. Advertised catalog, not the model used in any specific purchase. "Usage on AntSeed" counts only settlements whose buyers share the per-model split on-chain (metadata v2/v3, opt-in), so every usage figure is a lower bound.