Alibaba's Qwen models top global open-model downloads
Alibaba said its open-weight Qwen models were downloaded more than 3 billion times worldwide in the past six months, outpacing Google and Meta in Hugging Face data published Aug. 14. The company has open-sourced over 460 Qwen models and its ecosystem has produced more than 300,000 derivative models, and it distributes Qwen via its cloud to enterprise customers in Southeast Asia and Africa. The download lead suggests increasing global adoption of Chinese open models, expands the pool of models developers can fine-tune and deploy, and has spurred new open-model releases from US tech rivals.
Qwen models surpassed three billion downloads in six months.
Context
Developers are choosing open models more often. Alibaba released many Qwen models and shared them through its cloud. Companies may release more open models to compete.
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