The Chinese company Alibaba has unexpectedly taken the top spot for downloads of AI models that developers can adapt to their needs. The Qwen family of open models has been downloaded over three billion times in the last six months—figures that significantly surpass those of Meta* and Google. Open models allow users to customize them for specific tasks, train them on their own data, and create new products. Media reports indicate that Qwen, in particular, is seeing widespread adoption. This was reported by Ferra.
According to data from Hugging Face, Google’s models have been downloaded approximately 418 million times, while Meta’s* have seen around 227 million downloads. Qwen comprises not just a single model but an entire series of popular ones; Alibaba has released over 460 different variants, which developers have used to create more than 300,000 of their own versions.
Hugging Face identifies Qwen as a key pillar of the modern open AI ecosystem.
About the Author
