In the past six months, Alibaba Group’s Qwen series of open artificial intelligence models have been downloaded more than 3 billion times worldwide. This gives it a leading position in the global open source language model market, leapfrogging Western and Chinese competitors.
Image source: Alibaba Group
According to Alibaba, the Qwen family open source model contains more than 460 neural networks, and the entire ecosystem contains more than 300,000 derivative algorithms. The Hugging Face platform shows that the Google AI model was downloaded 418 million times in the first half of the year, and the neural network✴ — 227 million downloads. As a reminder, open AI models can be downloaded, customized, and used as the basis for new AI products.
With the popularity of open AI models around the world, the number of downloads of such algorithms and derivative models has become one of the indicators of the competition between China and the United States in the field of artificial intelligence. Chinese developers are trying to gain a leading position by promoting powerful models that are relatively cheap and easy to adapt to different tasks. Qwen’s significant global growth suggests the strategy is gaining traction outside of China.
Qwen, along with Moonshot AI Inc., DeepSeek and other Chinese artificial intelligence model developers, is delivering cutting-edge performance as it seeks to close the gap with proprietary neural networks from U.S. companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Export controls and restrictions on the supply of advanced AI accelerators needed for China’s AI infrastructure do not appear to have significantly slowed down the development of the industry in China.
Qwen model download data is obtained by Alibaba algorithm “One of the fundamental elements of the foundation of an open artificial intelligence ecosystem”Huggy Face reports. “Qwen has become part of the standard workflow for developers to decide which models to further customize and deploy.”,” Hugface said in a statement.
A broad family of AI models can become the basis of a self-evolving ecosystem: the more developers use such algorithms, the more derivative versions emerge, which in turn attracts new users. Alibaba reinforces this cycle by distributing Qwen via its cloud platform to corporate customers in Southeast Asian and African markets. As a result, the company achieves coverage that many competitors lack.
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