Volcano Engine Releases Doubao Large Model 1.8, Entering the Global Top Tier of Multimodal AI
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Volcano Engine has unveiled a major upgrade to its flagship foundation model, signaling a new leap forward in multimodal and agent-based AI capabilities.
On December 18, 2025, Volcano Engine officially launched Doubao Large Model 1.8 along with the audio-visual creation model Seedance 1.5 Pro at its FORCE Original Power Conference. According to authoritative evaluations, Doubao 1.8 has entered the global top tier in multimodal understanding, content generation, and agent capabilities.
Tan Dai, President of Volcano Engine, revealed that as of December, the Doubao model’s daily token usage has surpassed 50 trillion, representing more than a 10× increase year over year. Over 100 enterprise customers have each accumulated more than one trillion tokens in total usage, securing Doubao’s position as the most-used large model service on China’s public cloud platforms.
Doubao Large Model 1.8 is optimized for multimodal agent scenarios, with significant improvements in tool invocation, complex instruction following, and OS-level agent capabilities. Its visual understanding capacity has been upgraded, doubling the maximum number of video frames processed per inference from 640 to 1,280 frames. The model supports low-frame-rate comprehension of long videos as well as high-frame-rate analysis of critical segments, making it suitable for use cases such as online education and industrial quality inspection. It has also delivered leading results across multiple public benchmarks, including visual reasoning and BrowserComp evaluations.
Seedance 1.5 Pro achieves millisecond-level audio-visual synchronization and supports multilingual conversations and regional dialects. An upcoming “Draft Preview” feature is expected to boost creative efficiency by 65% while reducing ineffective production costs by 60%. Individual users can access Seedance via platforms such as Doubao, while enterprise users will be able to integrate it via API starting December 23.
In addition, Volcano Engine announced upgrades to its AI cloud-native architecture, introducing the AgentKit platform, HiAgent Workbench, and an “AI Cost-Saving Program” designed to accelerate large-scale deployment of AI agents across industries.
