Alibaba Group Holding’s open-weight fashions have collected greater than 3 billion international downloads up to now six months, eclipsing Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc. and home friends to change into the world’s No. 1 artificial-intelligence mannequin.
Qwen, Alibaba’s household of AI fashions, has open-sourced greater than 460 fashions and its ecosystem has spawned 300,000-plus derivatives, the Chinese language know-how firm stated in an emailed assertion. Google, a part of Alphabet, had 418 million downloads whereas Meta stood at 227 million in 2026, in keeping with common open-source AI hub Hugging Face Inc., which printed a state of open fashions report on Aug. 14.
Open fashions might be downloaded, custom-made and used as constructing blocks for brand new AI merchandise, making adoption a gauge of which applied sciences builders are selecting to construct on. That has made obtain and derivative-model figures one measure of affect within the US-China AI race, as Chinese language builders together with Alibaba push succesful fashions which are comparatively low-cost and simple to adapt. Qwen’s rise means that technique is gaining traction past China.
Qwen together with Moonshot AI Inc, DeepSeek and Chinese language AI mannequin builders are replicating frontier efficiency, in search of to bridge the hole with closed fashions in US, equivalent to OpenAI Inc. and Anthropic PBC. Export controls on chips and AI programs, such because the transient ban on abroad entry to Anthropic’s Fable 5 mannequin this summer season, don’t look like placing the brakes on Chinese language rivals.
Alibaba’s obtain knowledge for Qwen makes it “one of many largest foundations of the open AI ecosystem,” the Hugging Face report stated. The Hangzhou-based cloud, e-commerce and AI tech firm is making positive factors over native rivals DeepSeek, Moonshot Kimi and MiniMax in addition to US fashions.
“Qwen has change into a part of the default workflow for builders deciding what fashions to fine-tune and deploy,” the report stated.
A broad mannequin household can create a self-reinforcing ecosystem: extra builders undertake the fashions, extra spinoff variations are constructed, and that in flip attracts in new customers. Alibaba has bolstered that cycle by distributing Qwen by means of its cloud platform to enterprise clients in markets together with Southeast Asia and Africa, giving it a attain that many rivals lack.
US tech giants are responding. In current weeks, Meta and Nvidia Corp. have launched new open AI fashions as competitors for builders intensifies.
