Alibaba AI models pass Google, Meta with 3bn downloads

Alibaba's open-weight AI models, known as Qwen, have accumulated over 3 billion global downloads in the past six months, surpassing Meta and Google. According to Hugging Face, Qwen has become part of the default workflow for developers.

The Qwen family of AI models has open-sourced over 460 models, and its ecosystem has spawned over 300,000 derivatives. In comparison, Google had 418 million downloads, while Meta stood at 227 million, as per Hugging Face's state of open models report.

The popularity of Qwen indicates that Alibaba's strategy of offering capable, relatively cheap, and easy-to-adapt models is gaining traction beyond China. This has made download and derivative-model figures a measure of influence in the US-China AI race.

Brief written by urgent.news from Silicon Republic, Straits Times Business, PYMNTS — 3 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.