Alibaba's Qwen surpasses 3 billion downloads, sweeping away American competition

Alibaba Group Holding is making remarkable strides in the field of artificial intelligence. Its open-source Alibaba Qwen family of models has garnered more than three billion downloads worldwide in half a year, overtaking established American companies such as Meta and Google, as well as domestic Chinese competitors. With this achievement, Qwen has become the leading AI model in the world.

Alibaba has so far released more than 460 open source models to the public. The developer community has already created over 300,000 derivatives based on its technology. A report by the popular open source hub Hugging Face confirms that Google has reached 418 million downloads, while Meta has “only” 227 million. This data clearly shows that Qwen is becoming one of the largest foundational platforms in the open AI ecosystem.

Open models allow developers to download, adapt, and use them as a basis for developing new tools for free. The number of downloads and derivative models has therefore become a key measure of influence in the US-China race in artificial intelligence. Chinese creators are betting on powerful, yet relatively cheap and easily scalable solutions. This approach is apparently gaining increasing support outside of China.

In addition to Alibaba, other Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and other developers are rapidly catching up with the capabilities of closed American systems, including OpenAI and Anthropic. Despite export restrictions on chips and software and occasional bans on access to foreign models, China's progress seems to remain unstoppable.

Developing a large family of models creates a “self-perpetuating” cycle. The more developers there are, the more derivatives are created, which attracts new users. Alibaba further strengthens this cycle by distributing Qwen models through its cloud platform for business users in regions such as Southeast Asia and Africa, giving it a reach that many competitors do not have. Despite the immense popularity of open source projects, the question remains of the long-term sustainability and the actual stability of the derived systems in demanding business environments.