Chinese Social Media Platform RedNote Releases Open-Source AI Model

The Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, known internationally as RedNote, released its first open-source large language model (LLM), called dots.llm1, on Friday. The company claimed the model matches the performance of the leading AI models in the tech industry.

According to the South China Morning Post, the AI model released by RedNote is a mixture-of-experts (MoE) system—an architecture that includes multiple specialized sub-networks, or “experts,” designed for greater efficiency and to rival the most advanced AI models currently on the market.

RedNote explained that its AI research team developed dots.llm1 in collaboration with its in-house Humane Intelligence Lab. The company has been recruiting experts with strong backgrounds in the humanities to make sure its technology can better simulate and understand human behavior.

The company claims that dots.llm1 outperforms regional competitors, including Alibaba’s Qwen2.5, and DeepSeek-V3. RedNote also developed  Diandian, an AI research assistant, which includes a “deep research” function.

According to Reuters, unlike most American companies—such as Google and OpenAI—, Chinese firms are relying on open-source principles to showcase their technological capabilities and expand their global influence.

Users can download the model via Hugging Face and explore its technical specifications.

“The dots.llm1 model is a large-scale MoE model that activates 14B parameters out of a total of 142B parameters, delivering performance on par with state-of-the-art models,” states the company’s page on Hugging Face. “Leveraging our meticulously crafted and efficient data processing pipeline, dots.llm1 achieves performance comparable to Qwen2.5-72B after pretrained on 11.2T high-quality tokens without synthetic data.”

RedNote currently has around 300 million monthly active users and recently reached a $26 billion valuation. The company expects to launch its IPO later this year.

In January, RedNote gained significant popularity among American users as an alternative to TikTok amid the potential U.S. ban on the video-sharing platform.