# chain‑of‑thought

ByteDance’s Seedream 5.0 Lite Adds Live Web Retrieval to Image Generation — A Step Toward More Up‑to‑Date, Reasoning‑Capable Multimodal AI

ByteDance’s Volcano Engine has launched Seedream 5.0 Lite, a lightweight image‑generation model that for the first time supports real‑time web retrieval and chain‑of‑thought reasoning. Available now on the JiMeng creative platform and due for API rollout later in February, the release tightens the gap between static generative systems and live, context‑aware content creation while raising new questions about provenance, copyright and content safety.