Xiaohongshu

Xiaohongshu (known internationally as RedNote) is China's premier lifestyle and social-commerce platform, founded in Shanghai in 2013 by Miranda Qu and Charlwin Mao. The platform serves 300M+ monthly active users and generated ~$4.8B revenue in 2024. Backed by Tencent, Alibaba, HSG, Hillhouse, and GSR Ventures, its valuation climbed from $26B (June 2025) to $31B in September 2025 secondaries, and the company is preparing a Hong Kong IPO targeting a valuation above $70B with Goldman Sachs and CICC advising.

Xiaohongshu's LLM effort is led by Debing Zhang (ex-Kuaishou), who has run an independent large-model team since March 2023 — first building the internal Zhuji foundation model behind the Diandian assistant, then the open-weight dots family from the Humane Intelligence Lab (hi lab): dots.llm1 (June 2025, a from-scratch 142B MoE pretrained on 11.2T non-synthetic tokens), dots.vlm1 (August 2025, a from-scratch 1.2B NaViT vision encoder on a DeepSeek-V3 base), the breakout document parser dots.ocr, and dots.tts. On April 30, 2026, hi lab was elevated into Dots, a first-level AI department spanning model R&D, infrastructure, engineering, and product, reporting to president Ding Ling — and the team now publishes scaling-science research under the "Dots Studio" affiliation.

A second research identity, the FireRed team (Super Intelligence team: Audio Lab, Vision Lab, and Foundation Lab; HF org FireRedTeam), ships industrial-grade speech and vision models — FireRedASR, FireRedTTS, and the FireRed-Image-Edit foundation model. Xiaohongshu's open releases have unusually strong community adoption for a consumer-platform lab: dots.ocr and its successor dots.mocr have ~850K combined HuggingFace downloads, though no Xiaohongshu model is yet tracked by Artificial Analysis or served on OpenRouter.