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According to research published on Friday by consultancy AIBase, citing data from Hugging Face, estimated Qwen downloads as of December alone exceeded the combined total of the next eight most popular models on the platform globally, including those from Meta Platforms and OpenAI, as well as Chinese firms Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI and MiniMax.
Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing services unit of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.
The volume of Qwen downloads on Hugging Face reinforced its position as the world’s leading open-source ecosystem.
“Tens of thousands of real-world applications around the globe have been built based on Qwen, marking a historic peak for [Chinese] open-source large models within the international developer community,” the AIBase report said.
According to research published in October, Alibaba’s Cloud’s Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct, a lightweight variant, was the most downloaded AI model on Hugging Face.
