Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen family of artificial intelligence models has reached a major milestone, crossing more than 700 million downloads on the developer platform Hugging Face as of January. This achievement makes Qwen the most widely used open-source AI system in the world.
Research released on Friday by consultancy AIBase, based on Hugging Face data, shows just how far ahead Qwen has pulled. In December alone, estimated downloads of Qwen models were higher than the combined total of the next eight most popular AI models on the platform. Those include offerings from Meta Platforms and OpenAI, as well as Chinese AI firms such as Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax.
Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing and AI arm of Alibaba Group Holding, which also owns the South China Morning Post.
Qwen strengthens its lead in open-source AI
The huge number of downloads highlights Qwen’s growing influence in the global AI community. According to the AIBase report, “Tens of thousands of real-world applications around the globe have been built based on Qwen, marking a historic peak for [Chinese] open-source large models within the international developer community.”
Earlier research published in October also pointed to Qwen’s popularity. Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct, a lightweight version of the model, was named the most downloaded AI model on Hugging Face at the time.
Investors respond positively
The strong performance of Qwen has not gone unnoticed by the market. Alibaba’s shares in Hong Kong climbed by more than 5 per cent during afternoon trading on Monday, reflecting investor confidence in the company’s AI strategy.
A flexible approach to model design
Much of Qwen’s success comes from Alibaba Cloud’s decision to open source a wide range of models. These range from lightweight versions with around 600 million parameters to much larger models with tens of billions of parameters.
Parameters are essentially the elements that store an AI model’s knowledge and abilities. In general, more parameters mean stronger performance. By offering models of different sizes, Alibaba has made it easier for developers to pick the right option for their specific needs.
Qwen finds its way into everyday products
Beyond developers, Alibaba and its affiliates have been weaving Qwen models into consumer-facing apps and services. These include the Qwen AI assistant itself and Ant Group’s health app, A-Fu.
The impact has been clear. In December, the Qwen chatbot jumped four places to reach eighth position on Apple’s China App Store. During the same period, downloads of the A-Fu health app surged, rising to fifth place from 94th in the most downloaded category.
Last month, Alibaba took another step to strengthen its AI push by creating a new division called the Qwen Consumer Business Group. Led by vice-president Wu Jia, the unit will oversee products such as the Qwen chatbot app, the Quark AI assistant and cloud drive, AI hardware, the UC Browser, and the online reading platform Shuqi.
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