Alibaba’s Qwen family hits 700 million downloads to lead global open-source AI adoption

South China Morning Post - Jan 12, 2026

Alibaba Cloud’s flagship Qwen family of artificial intelligence models surpassed 700 million downloads as of January on the developer platform Hugging Face, which made it the world’s most widely used open-source AI system. According to research published by Interconnects.ai, citing data from Hugging Face, estimated Qwen downloads as of December alone exceeded the combined total of the next eight most popular models on the platform globally, including those from Meta Platforms and OpenAI, as well...

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