HANGZHOU: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s open-weight models have accumulated more than three billion global downloads in the past six months, eclipsing Meta Platforms Inc, Alphabet Inc and domestic peers to become the world’s No 1 artificial-intelligence (AI) model.
Qwen, Alibaba’s family of AI models, has open-sourced more than 460 models and its ecosystem has spawned 300,000-plus derivatives, the Chinese tech company said in an emailed statement. Google, part of Alphabet, had 418 million downloads while Meta stood at 227 million in 2026, according to popular open-source AI hub Hugging Face Inc, which published a state of open models report last Friday.
Open models can be downloaded, customised and used as building blocks for new AI products, making adoption a gauge of which technologies developers are choosing to build on.
That has made download and derivative-model figures one measure of influence in the US-China AI race, as Chinese developers including Alibaba push capable models that are relatively cheap and easy to adapt. Qwen’s rise suggests that strategy is gaining traction beyond China.
Qwen, Moonshot AI Inc, DeepSeek and Chinese AI model builders are replicating frontier performance, seeking to bridge the gap with closed models in the United States, such as OpenAI Inc and Anthropic PBC.
Alibaba’s download data for Qwen makes it “one of the largest foundations of the open AI ecosystem”, the Hugging Face report said. — Bloomberg
