Xiaohongshu open-sources dots3-note, its IMO perfect-score LLM
China's AI week keeps delivering: a social-commerce giant just opened the weights of the first model family to ace the International Mathematical Olympiad, and the country's top foundry is cashing in on AI demand like never before.
Xiaohongshu's dots lab open-sourced dots3-note preview, the first public release from the dots3 series — the same family as dots-note-3.0, which last month became the first AI system to score an official perfect 42/42 at the International Mathematical Olympiad. The 280-billion-parameter MoE (16 billion active) carries a 512K context window and multimodal understanding across text, vision, and audio. Rather than chasing another math leaderboard, dots3-note preview is aimed at long-horizon agent tasks — the messy, open-ended jobs like travel planning, wedding prep, or running a small store that stretch across hours or days and have no single right answer. That positioning tracks where the agent market is heading: tasks that take a human more than an hour to finish.
The lab says the model matches or beats models several times its size on reasoning and agent benchmarks, with vision performance that stands out in its weight class — which would make the IMO gold look less like a party trick and more like a genuine reasoning core. The full dots3 lineup will span note, jazz, and aria tiers, so this is the beachhead of a family rather than a one-off. It is also the latest sign that China's biggest consumer platforms are treating open weights as table stakes, not a differentiator.
SMIC, China's largest foundry, raised wafer prices and posted record revenue above $3 billion as AI demand tightens chip supply. Co-CEO Zhao Haijun said on the earnings call that the company negotiated price increases with customers in the first quarter and will charge more for wafers processed in the third quarter. "Future wafer starts are far exceeding our previous expectations," he said, with the company weighing more capacity as AI-related orders keep beating forecasts and drive what he expects to be a strong second half. The pricing power is notable for a foundry that historically competed on cost: AI demand is now so concentrated that even China's most sanctioned chipmaker can name its price.
What to watch: the rest of the dots3 family (jazz, aria) — and whether SMIC's hikes flow through to AI hardware prices later this year.
An IMO-perfect model aimed at wedding planning instead of math olympiads — is that the right use of a reasoning breakthrough? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Dots Lab announcement · DoNews · 36Kr · Reuters · Economic Times · South China Morning Post
