Alibaba Overtakes Google and Meta With 3 Billion AI Model Downloads

Alibaba’s open-weight AI models have become the world’s most downloaded artificial intelligence offerings, surpassing those of Google, Meta, and Chinese competitors such as DeepSeek, according to recent reports. In the past six months, Alibaba's Qwen family of AI models have been downloaded over 3 billion times globally, according to Bloomberg News. The company disclosed that its ecosystem has released more than 460 open-source models and over 300,000 derivatives.

Open-source AI models can be utilized to create new AI products, making adoption a measure of their popularity among developers. This has made download and derivative-model numbers a gauge of influence in the competition between Chinese and American AI companies. Alibaba's download data for Qwen indicates that this strategy is gaining traction outside China, as noted by Hugging Face, an open-source AI hub.

The popularity of Qwen suggests that it is now a part of the default workflow for developers when deciding on models to fine-tune and deploy. American tech giants, including Meta and Nvidia, have responded to this trend by recently releasing new open AI models. The debate over open-source and closed-source AI models has divided the AI industry, with Nvidia and other tech companies forming an AI safety coalition to bolster defenses against cybersecurity threats.

CFOs of middle-market firms must weigh the financial benefits against the responsibility of managing the infrastructure behind open models, as this tradeoff becomes increasingly important as AI applications extend beyond isolated chatbots into various business functions.