BEIJING, June 9 (Reuters) - China's Rednote, one of the

country's most popular social media platforms, has released an

open-source large language model, joining a wave of Chinese tech

firms making their artificial intelligence models freely

available.

The approach contrasts with many U.S. tech giants like

OpenAI and Google, which have kept their most advanced

models proprietary, though some American firms including Meta

have also released open-source models.

Open sourcing allows Chinese companies to demonstrate their

technological capabilities, build developer communities and

spread influence globally at a time when the U.S. has sought to

stymie China's tech progress with export restrictions on

advanced semiconductors.

Rednote's model, called dots.llm1, is available for download

on developer platform Hugging Face. A company technical paper

describing it was uploaded on Friday.

In coding tasks, the model performs comparably to Alibaba's ( BABA )

Qwen 2.5 series, though it trails more advanced models such as

DeepSeek-V3, the technical paper said.

RedNote, also known by its Chinese name Xiaohongshu, is an

Instagram-like platform where users share photos, videos, text

posts and live streams. The platform gained international

attention earlier this year when some U.S. users flocked to the

app amid concerns over a potential TikTok ban.

The company has invested in large language model development

since 2023, not long after OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in late

2022.

It has accelerated its AI efforts in recent months,

launching Diandian, an AI-powered search application that helps

users find content on Xiaohongshu's main platform.

Other companies that are pursuing an open-source approach

include Alibaba ( BABA ) which launched Qwen 3, an upgraded

version of its model in April.

Earlier this year, startup DeepSeek released its low-cost R1

model as open-source software, shaking up the global AI industry

due to its competitive performance despite being developed at a

fraction of the cost of Western rivals.