Alibaba's Qwen model reaches 3 billion global downloads

Alibaba's Qwen family of AI models achieved 3 billion global downloads over the past six months, according to a Hugging Face platform report published on August 14, making it the world's most-downloaded open model. On the Hugging Face Hub alone, Qwen accounts for 2.045 billion downloads, significantly surpassing Google with 418 million and Meta with 227 million. This lead extends to derived models: 151,000 Qwen-based variations exist on the platform, compared to Google's 82,500 and representing 2.6 times more than Meta's Llama series. Alibaba has released 460 Qwen models and enabled over 300,000 additional derived models. The report highlights that Qwen has become one of the largest foundations of the open AI ecosystem and now integrates into developers' standard workflow. Data shows that smaller models with fewer than 1 billion parameters account for 83% of total downloads, while larger models with 100 billion parameters or more represent just 1% of volume.