Alibaba

Artificial Intelligence · Open-Source Software · China Tech

Milestone

Alibaba's Qwen hits 3B downloads, overtakes Meta and Google

Independent tracker Hugging Face logged roughly a third fewer downloads than the company claimed, showing how loosely open-source leaderboards are verified.

• Alibaba says its open-weight Qwen model family topped 3 billion global downloads in the past six months, surpassing Google (418 million) and Meta (227 million) per Hugging Face data.
• Qwen is Alibaba's open-source AI model family; the company has released more than 460 Qwen models, spawning an ecosystem of over 300,000 derivative models built by outside developers.
• Hugging Face's own State of Open Models report counted about 2.05 billion Qwen downloads this year and 151,448 derivatives, roughly a third and half below Alibaba's self-reported figures.
• Qwen's rise comes alongside DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax, as Chinese labs push cheap, permissively licensed open-weight models to close the gap with closed frontier systems from OpenAI and Anthropic.
• Beijing has reportedly been weighing curbs on overseas access to China's top AI models, a policy shift that could cut off the global distribution driving Qwen's download lead.
• Download and derivative counts are becoming a proxy for developer mindshare in the US-China AI race, since open weights let builders adopt a model's technology without paying for API access.