ByteDance's Breakthrough Release of Seed Diffusion Preview: Discrete Diffusion Technology Leads a New Era of Code Generation

August 01, 2025
Bytedance
3 min

News Summary

ByteDance's Seed team officially launched its experimental diffusion language model, Seed Diffusion Preview, on July 31st, marking a revolutionary AI technology breakthrough. The model employs a discrete diffusion technical approach, focusing on structured code generation. It achieves an astonishing inference speed of 2146 tokens/s, representing a 5.4-fold performance increase compared to autoregressive models of comparable scale, and signifies a significant advancement in foundational frameworks for next-generation language models.


Technological Breakthrough Ushers in a New Era

ByteDance's Seed team today announced the launch of its experimental diffusion language model, Seed Diffusion Preview. The initiative aims to systematically validate the feasibility of the discrete diffusion technical approach as a foundational framework for next-generation language models, with structured code generation serving as its primary experimental domain.

This technological release marks a major innovation in the field of AI language models. Unlike traditional autoregressive models, Seed Diffusion Preview adopts a brand-new discrete diffusion technical architecture, specifically optimized for code generation tasks.

Performance Exceeds Expectations

Experimental results show that Seed Diffusion Preview's code inference speed can reach 2146 tokens/s, a 5.4-fold increase in speed compared to autoregressive models of comparable scale. This performance breakthrough has garnered widespread attention in the industry, setting a new benchmark for AI code generation efficiency.

Even more remarkably, Seed Diffusion Preview's performance is comparable to excellent autoregressive models on multiple industry benchmarks, and it surpasses them in tasks such as code editing. Particularly in code editing tasks requiring a global perspective and planning, the model demonstrates the inherent advantages of the diffusion model framework.

Analysis of Core Technical Advantages

The core innovation of Seed Diffusion Preview lies in the application of discrete diffusion technology. While achieving efficient sampling, the model demonstrates performance comparable to autoregressive models of the same scale in multiple code generation benchmarks.

In the field of code editing, the model performs exceptionally well. In code editing tasks (such as CanitEdit) that require a global perspective and planning, the model demonstrates the inherent advantages of the diffusion model framework, outperforming autoregressive-based models and offering new possibilities for solving more complex structured reasoning problems.

Profound Significance of the Technical Path

ByteDance's team provided an in-depth interpretation of the significance of this technological breakthrough. Officially, they stated that Seed Diffusion Preview validates the inference acceleration potential of discrete diffusion models in large language models.

More importantly, the team also believes that inference acceleration is merely the most direct, superficial advantage of this technical path. The Seed Diffusion project will be dedicated to uncovering its deeper value, continuously exploring its scaling laws and applications in complex reasoning tasks.

Demonstration of Seed Team's Technical Prowess

Established in 2023, ByteDance's Seed team is dedicated to discovering new methods for general intelligence and pushing the boundaries of AI. The team's research areas include large language models, speech, vision, world models, infrastructure, AI infrastructure, and next-generation AI interaction.

The release of Seed Diffusion Preview further demonstrates the team's strong capabilities in cutting-edge AI technology research and development. From the previous Seed-TTS speech synthesis model to the current diffusion language model, the Seed team continues to achieve breakthrough progress in multiple AI technology domains.

Industry Impact and Future Outlook

The release of Seed Diffusion Preview holds significant implications for the entire AI industry. Its 5.4-fold speed increase while maintaining performance offers a new technical path for optimizing AI model efficiency.

This technological breakthrough, particularly its excellent performance in code generation and editing, foreshadows a potential fundamental change in how programmers work in the future. More efficient code generation tools will significantly boost software development efficiency, driving the progress of the entire technology industry.