Alibaba's Qwen AI Model Surpasses 3 Billion Global Downloads

Alibaba's open-source artificial intelligence model, Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen), has surpassed 3 billion global downloads in the last six months, according to a report cited by IT Home. This milestone positions the Qwen family of models as the most downloaded globally, exceeding those from competitors like Meta and Google (Alphabet).

The report from the open AI community platform Hugging Face indicates that Qwen models accumulated 2.045 billion downloads solely on its platform. In comparison, Google's models registered approximately 418 million downloads, and Meta's models had around 227 million. Alibaba has released over 460 Qwen models as open-source, which have spurred the creation of more than 300,000 derivative models.

Hugging Face describes Qwen as a significant foundation within the open AI ecosystem. The report also highlights a trend where leading Chinese AI labs are releasing open models with larger parameter counts than those from US-based labs. Furthermore, Chinese models generally offer more permissive licenses for commercial applications.

Specifically, Qwen models in GGUF format, used for local deployment, see about 39.6 million downloads per month. This is nearly double the downloads for Gemma and more than five times that of Llama. Hugging Face cautions that download counts do not directly equate to model quality or market share, as API calls and private deployments are not included in this statistic.