Alibaba's open-weight models top 3B downloads in six months; Qwen derivatives exceed 151K
Bloomberg reports Alibaba's open-weight models surpassed 3 billion global downloads in the past six months, with Hugging Face data showing Google at 418 million and Meta at 227 million downloads in 2026. Hugging Face also reports that Qwen models have spawned over 151,000 derivatives, making Qwen one of the largest foundations in the open model ecosystem.
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Techmeme
Saritha Rai / Bloomberg : Alibaba's open-weight models have accumulated 3B+ global downloads in the past six months; Hugging Face: Google had 418M downloads while Meta had 227M in 2026 — Alibaba Group Holding's open-weight models have accumulated more than 3 billion global downloads in the past six months …

Techmeme
Hugging Face : Hugging Face says developers made 151K+ derivatives based on Qwen models, topping others, making Qwen one of the largest foundations in the open model ecosystem — In the AI world, time feels compressed. A few months after our spring report in our biannual analysis worked through the ecosystem …
