o4-mini (high) vs Seed 1.6 Flash

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

o4-mini (high) is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 63 to 56. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

o4-mini (high)'s sharpest advantage is in mathematics, where it averages 82.9 against 67.1. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SWE-bench Verified, 45 to 24. Seed 1.6 Flash does hit back in multimodal & grounded, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Seed 1.6 Flash 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 Flash gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for o4-mini (high).

Quick Verdict

Pick o4-mini (high) if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Seed 1.6 Flash only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you need the larger 256K context window.

Agentic

o4-mini (high)

o4-mini (high)

58.5

Seed 1.6 Flash

54.5

58
Terminal-Bench 2.0
52
64
BrowseComp
62
55
OSWorld-Verified
52

Coding

o4-mini (high)

o4-mini (high)

38.7

Seed 1.6 Flash

27.6

74
HumanEval
59
45
SWE-bench Verified
24
34
LiveCodeBench
25
42
SWE-bench Pro
31

Multimodal & Grounded

Seed 1.6 Flash

o4-mini (high)

68.3

Seed 1.6 Flash

73.1

66
MMMU-Pro
74
71
OfficeQA Pro
72

Reasoning

o4-mini (high)

o4-mini (high)

77.4

Seed 1.6 Flash

66.8

80
SimpleQA
61
78
MuSR
59
83
BBH
75
75
LongBench v2
70
74
MRCRv2
74

Knowledge

o4-mini (high)

o4-mini (high)

61.2

Seed 1.6 Flash

47.3

82
MMLU
65
82
GPQA
64
80
SuperGPQA
62
78
OpenBookQA
60
76
MMLU-Pro
65
13
HLE
3
73
FrontierScience
57

Instruction Following

o4-mini (high)

o4-mini (high)

83

Seed 1.6 Flash

81

83
IFEval
81

Multilingual

o4-mini (high)

o4-mini (high)

81.7

Seed 1.6 Flash

72.8

83
MGSM
76
81
MMLU-ProX
71

Mathematics

o4-mini (high)

o4-mini (high)

82.9

Seed 1.6 Flash

67.1

83
AIME 2023
64
85
AIME 2024
66
84
AIME 2025
65
79
HMMT Feb 2023
60
81
HMMT Feb 2024
62
80
HMMT Feb 2025
61
82
BRUMO 2025
63
84
MATH-500
72

Frequently Asked Questions

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

o4-mini (high) is ahead overall, 63 to 56. The biggest single separator in this matchup is SWE-bench Verified, where the scores are 45 and 24.

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

o4-mini (high) has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 61.2 versus 47.3. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

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

o4-mini (high) has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 38.7 versus 27.6. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

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

o4-mini (high) has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 82.9 versus 67.1. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

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

o4-mini (high) has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 77.4 versus 66.8. Inside this category, SimpleQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

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

o4-mini (high) has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 58.5 versus 54.5. 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, o4-mini (high) or Seed 1.6 Flash?

Seed 1.6 Flash has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 73.1 versus 68.3. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

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

o4-mini (high) has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 83 versus 81. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

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

o4-mini (high) has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 81.7 versus 72.8. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 12, 2026

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