In the past six months, China's tech giant Alibaba has seen the global cumulative downloads of its open-weight models exceed 3 billion times, surpassing US tech giants Meta and Alphabet as well as its Chinese peers, making it the most downloaded AI model in the world.
According to Bloomberg, Alibaba stated in an email that its Qwen AI model series has open-sourced more than 460 models, with over 300,000 derivative models in its ecosystem.
A report released on Friday (August 14) by open-source AI platform Hugging Face showed that this year, downloads of Alphabet's Google models have reached 418 million, while Facebook's parent company Meta's reached 227 million.
Open models can be downloaded, customized, and used as the foundation for developing new AI products. Therefore, the adoption of these models has also become an indicator of which technologies developers choose as their development foundation.
As developers in China, including Alibaba, release powerful models that are relatively low in cost and easy to fine-tune, the quantity of downloads and derivative models has become one of the indicators measuring influence in the China-US AI competition.
The report believes that the rise of Qwen indicates that this strategy is being adopted by more developers outside of China.
Chinese AI model developers such as Qwen, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek are striving to achieve cutting-edge performance and narrow the gap with closed-source models from US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Export control measures on chips and AI systems, such as this summer's brief ban on overseas users accessing Anthropic's Fable 5 model, do not appear to have hindered the progress of Chinese competitors.
Hugging Face's report noted that Qwen's download data make it “one of the biggest foundations of the open AI ecosystem.”
The report also stated: “For developers deciding which models to fine-tune and deploy, Qwen has become part of their default workflow.”
A wide-ranging series of models can form a self-reinforcing ecosystem: the more developers adopt these models, the more derivatives are created, which in turn attracts new users. Alibaba offers Qwen to enterprise clients in markets such as Southeast Asia and Africa via its cloud platform, further reinforcing this cycle and giving it a reach many competitors lack.