Dots3-Note Preview Opens a 280B Multimodal Agent Model

Dots Studio announced dots3-note preview at 02:00:31 UTC on 14 August 2026, or 04:00:31 SAST. The official model card describes it as the first open-weight model in the dots3 family. The checkpoint and modelling code are available through Hugging Face and GitHub under Apache 2.0.

The preview label matters. Dots Studio has released usable weights and deployment instructions, but it has not described this build as generally available or announced a maker-hosted production API. The release is aimed at people who want to inspect or serve the model themselves.

Dots3-note preview is a mixture-of-experts model with 280 billion total parameters and 16 billion active parameters. It supports a context length of up to 512K tokens. Inputs can include text, images, video and audio, while output is text.

The model card lists reasoning, tool use, code generation, long-context work and multimodal understanding among its target tasks. Those are maker claims. Dots Studio has published benchmark charts, but independent testing will be needed before treating the reported scores as a production guarantee.

The recommended FP8 setup uses one eight-GPU node. The documented vLLM path is available on main. Dots Studio's SGLang recipe uses a dedicated release image, while the listed Transformers and SGLang source integrations are still tied to open pull requests.

This is not a lightweight local download for an ordinary laptop. The 16-billion active-parameter figure reduces inference work compared with a dense 280-billion-parameter model, but the full checkpoint and multimodal encoders still demand serious hardware.

OpenRouter created dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free at 03:04:32 UTC, exactly 1 hour, 4 minutes and 1 second after the maker announcement. AIMI first observed the route in OpenRouter's models endpoint at 03:57:16 UTC, 52 minutes and 44 seconds after the provider timestamp and 1 hour, 56 minutes and 45 seconds after the announcement.

OpenRouter listed the route at zero input and output cost when AIMI captured it. That proves a free provider route at the observation time, not a permanent price promise. AIMI has not run a route handshake yet, so availability is listed without a successful generation test.

AIMI then recorded the route as removed at 06:21:40 UTC on 14 August and added again at 05:52:23 UTC on 15 August, an absence of exactly 23 hours, 30 minutes and 43 seconds. The reappearance confirms provider-route availability at that later observation. It is not a second Dots Studio release.

Dots Studio announced dots3-note preview at 04:00:31 SAST on 14 August. Qwen recorded its final official Qwen3.8-27B model-card update at 17:00:01 SAST that day, exactly 12 hours, 59 minutes and 30 seconds later.

OpenRouter's Dots3 route reappeared at 07:52:23 SAST on 15 August. That was 14 hours, 52 minutes and 22 seconds after the Qwen model-card update and 27 hours, 51 minutes and 52 seconds after the Dots Studio announcement. These timestamps describe separate maker and provider events. They do not establish that either company responded to the other.