# Seedream 4

> Seedream 4 is available on Artifio.ai — a unified AI workspace with a single pay-as-you-go wallet.

- Canonical page: https://artifio.ai/models/bytedance-seedream-v4-text-to-image
- Run it: https://artifio.ai/create/bytedance-seedream-v4-text-to-image
- Modality: prompt to image
- Model brand: bytedance
- Pricing: from about $0.025 per generation (exact cost shown in the workspace before you confirm; varies with selected options)
- Typical generation time: ~30s (catalogue estimate)
- Full pricing table: https://artifio.ai/pricing/models

## About Seedream 4

Seedream 4.0 is an image generation model from ByteDance's Seed team, released on September 9, 2025. It merges text-to-image synthesis, image editing, and multi-image composition into one architecture, and the accompanying technical report describes an efficient diffusion transformer paired with a VAE that sharply reduces the number of image tokens the model has to process. That efficiency work is why ByteDance quotes inference more than ten times faster than Seedream 3.0, with a 2K image generated in as little as 1.8 seconds.

This page covers the text-to-image mode: you give it a prompt, optionally with reference images, and it draws from scratch. The release raised the family's resolution ceiling from 2K to 4K and leaned hard into rendering structured text such as formulas, tables, and chemical diagrams inside the image. On Artifio it runs alongside 100+ models in one workspace, pay-per-generation, with no per-model subscription.

## Features

- Generates native high-resolution images from 1K up to 4K, up from the 2K ceiling of Seedream 3.0.
- Produces a 2K image in about 1.8 seconds, using adversarial distillation, quantization, and speculative decoding described in the technical report.
- Renders structured text inside images, including formulas, tables, and chemical structures.
- Covers more than 30 artistic styles and scene types from plain text prompts.
- Accepts text alone or text combined with reference images, and can return several output images from a single request for storyboards or comic sequences.
- Applies commonsense knowledge while drawing, shown in official demos that solve crosswords and continue comic strips inside the generated image.

## What people use it for

- Posters and marketing graphics where legible embedded text has to come out right the first time.
- Educational material with formulas, tables, or chemistry diagrams baked into the image.
- Storyboards and comic panels generated as a multi-image batch from one prompt.
- Concept art across many styles when a project needs quick visual range.
- 4K stills intended for print or large-format display.

## Reported strengths

- Speed is a documented headline: roughly 1.8 seconds for a 2K image is fast for this quality tier.
- Text rendering was a step ahead of most rivals at release, especially for dense or technical content.
- The technical report notes it ranked first on both the Artificial Analysis text-to-image and image-editing leaderboards when it launched in September 2025.
- Knowledge-aware generation handles prompts that require reasoning, such as puzzle completion, better than pattern-matching models.

## Reported limitations

- Newer models have overtaken it: as of July 2026 it sits at rank 16 with an Elo of 1188 on the Artificial Analysis text-to-image arena, behind GPT Image 2, Reve 2.0, and Google's Nano Banana line.
- ByteDance's own MagicBench comparison shows Seedream 4.5 beating it on prompt adherence, alignment, and aesthetics.
- Several launch benchmark claims come from MagicBench and MagicArena, evaluation platforms ByteDance runs itself.

## Sources

1. Seedream 4.0 Officially Released: Beyond Drawing, Into Imagination (ByteDance Seed): https://seed.bytedance.com/en/blog/seedream-4-0-officially-released-beyond-drawing-into-imagination
2. Seedream 4.0: Toward Next-generation Multimodal Image Generation (arXiv): https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20427
3. Seedream 4.0 (ByteDance Seed): https://seed.bytedance.com/en/seedream4_0
4. Text to Image Leaderboard (Artificial Analysis): https://artificialanalysis.ai/image/leaderboard/text-to-image

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