HANGZHOU, Jan. 13 (Xinhua) — Alibaba's Qwen family of artificial intelligence (AI) models has recorded 700 million downloads on its Hugging Face collaborative AI platform as of this month, making it the most popular open source AI system worldwide, according to the Qwen team.
According to data from Hugging Face, Qwen will surpass Meta's Llama in cumulative downloads by October 2025. In December of the same year, its single-month downloads exceeded the combined total of the next eight most popular models: Meta, DeepSeek, OpenAI, Mistral, Nvidia, Zhipu.AI, Moonshot, and MiniMax.
Alibaba open sourced the Qwen model in 2023, becoming the first major Chinese technology company to make a homegrown large-scale language model (LLM) publicly available.
The Qwen family covers both textual and multimodal tasks and supports 119 languages and regional dialects.
To date, Alibaba has open sourced approximately 400 models of the Qwen lineup, resulting in more than 180,000 derivative versions. According to the Qwen team, these numbers establish the family as the most prolific open LLM in the world.
According to the team, since the second half of last year, Qwen's global download growth rate has ranked first among five major open source model vendors.
“Our core goal is to continue to push the frontiers of LLM performance while maintaining the openness of open source so that AI can truly help more people around the world,” researchers from the Qwen team told Xinhua. ■
