Seed 1.6 vs o4-mini (high)

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.

Seed 1.6 has the cleaner overall profile here, landing at 65 versus 63. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.

Seed 1.6's sharpest advantage is in multimodal & grounded, where it averages 79.6 against 68.3. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MMMU-Pro, 80 to 66. o4-mini (high) does hit back in mathematics, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Seed 1.6 is the reasoning model in the pair, while o4-mini (high) is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Seed 1.6 gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for o4-mini (high).

Quick Verdict

Pick Seed 1.6 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. o4-mini (high) only becomes the better choice if mathematics is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Agentic

Seed 1.6

Seed 1.6

62.3

o4-mini (high)

58.5

63
Terminal-Bench 2.0
58
67
BrowseComp
64
58
OSWorld-Verified
55

Coding

Seed 1.6

Seed 1.6

42.4

o4-mini (high)

38.7

64
HumanEval
74
46
SWE-bench Verified
45
38
LiveCodeBench
34
46
SWE-bench Pro
42

Multimodal & Grounded

Seed 1.6

Seed 1.6

79.6

o4-mini (high)

68.3

80
MMMU-Pro
66
79
OfficeQA Pro
71

Reasoning

o4-mini (high)

Seed 1.6

74.5

o4-mini (high)

77.4

69
SimpleQA
80
69
MuSR
78
86
BBH
83
77
LongBench v2
75
78
MRCRv2
74

Knowledge

o4-mini (high)

Seed 1.6

56.4

o4-mini (high)

61.2

73
MMLU
82
72
GPQA
82
70
SuperGPQA
80
68
OpenBookQA
78
75
MMLU-Pro
76
11
HLE
13
68
FrontierScience
73

Instruction Following

Seed 1.6

Seed 1.6

87

o4-mini (high)

83

87
IFEval
83

Multilingual

Seed 1.6

Seed 1.6

83.4

o4-mini (high)

81.7

88
MGSM
83
81
MMLU-ProX
81

Mathematics

o4-mini (high)

Seed 1.6

75.9

o4-mini (high)

82.9

72
AIME 2023
83
74
AIME 2024
85
73
AIME 2025
84
68
HMMT Feb 2023
79
70
HMMT Feb 2024
81
69
HMMT Feb 2025
80
71
BRUMO 2025
82
82
MATH-500
84

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Seed 1.6 or o4-mini (high)?

Seed 1.6 is ahead overall, 65 to 63. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MMMU-Pro, where the scores are 80 and 66.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Seed 1.6 or o4-mini (high)?

o4-mini (high) has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 61.2 versus 56.4. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Seed 1.6 or o4-mini (high)?

Seed 1.6 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 42.4 versus 38.7. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for math, Seed 1.6 or o4-mini (high)?

o4-mini (high) has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 82.9 versus 75.9. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Seed 1.6 or o4-mini (high)?

o4-mini (high) has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 77.4 versus 74.5. Inside this category, SimpleQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Seed 1.6 or o4-mini (high)?

Seed 1.6 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 62.3 versus 58.5. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multimodal and grounded tasks, Seed 1.6 or o4-mini (high)?

Seed 1.6 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.6 versus 68.3. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Seed 1.6 or o4-mini (high)?

Seed 1.6 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 87 versus 83. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Seed 1.6 or o4-mini (high)?

Seed 1.6 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 83.4 versus 81.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 12, 2026

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