Alibaba's Qwen AI outpaces Meta and Google with 3B downloads
Alibaba's Qwen AI models have smashed past 3 billion downloads in only six months, making them the world's most downloaded AI family and outpacing big names like Meta and Google.
Their open-source setup means anyone can tweak and build on them, which is why they're being used as building blocks for new AI projects.
Qwen growth triggers open models race
The Qwen lineup includes over 460 models, with more than 300,000 spin-offs already created.
Alibaba is distributing these tools through its cloud platform to enterprise customers in markets including Southeast Asia and Africa.
Seeing this surge, US tech giants like Meta and NVIDIA are now racing to release their own open models.
Hugging Face even called Qwen "one of the largest foundations of the open AI ecosystem," showing just how much the game has changed.