Why Weibo’s tiny VibeThinker-3B has the AI world arguing over benchmarks again
On Sunday, a team of nine researchers at Sina Weibo — the Chinese social media giant better known for its microblogging platform than for cutting-edge artificial intelligence — quietly posted a 14-page technical report to arXiv that sent shockwaves through the AI research communi
On Sunday, a team of nine researchers at Sina Weibo — the Chinese social media giant better known for its microblogging platform than for cutting-edge artificial intelligence — quietly posted a 14-page technical report to arXiv that sent shockwaves through the AI research community. Their claim: a language model with just 3 billion parameters can match or exceed the reasoning performance of flagship systems from Google DeepMind , OpenAI , Anthropic , and DeepSeek that are hundreds of times larger. The model, called VibeThinker-3B , scored 94.3 on AIME 2026 — the American Invitational Mathematics Examination, one of the most demanding standardized math competitions in the world. That figure places it alongside DeepSeek V3.2 , a model with 671 billion parameters, and ahead of Gemini 3 Pro , Google's high-performance flagship reasoning system, which scored 91.7. With a test-time scaling technique the team calls Claim-Level Reliability Assessment, the score climbs to 97.1, edging past virt
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