Alibaba’s Qwen family just hit 700 million Hugging Face downloads—world’s top open-source LLM, and it’s powering Japan’s AI too.
700 million downloads don’t lie: Alibaba’s Qwen is the open-source king devs are flocking to, hitting this milestone by January 2026. This surge cements Chinese models at ~15% global share, driven by aggressive open-sourcing from lightweight to massive variants[3].
Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) now leads Hugging Face as the most-used open-source AI system, with frequent upgrades making it a go-to for programming and design tasks. DeepSeek’s ecosystem complements it, with R1’s low-cost punch and a mysterious ‘MODEL1’ teasing more[3]. Nikkei’s ratings even rank DeepSeek #1 open-source, outpacing Google and OpenAI[3].
Devs win big: Grab production-ready models for codebases, docs, or agents without vendor lock-in. It’s fueling overseas adoption—six of Japan’s top 10 models build on Qwen/DeepSeek, even national projects like LLM-jp[3]. Real workflows, real scale.
Versus Western giants: While OpenAI APIs rake $1B ARR[1], Qwen’s breadth (600M to tens-of-billions params) offers flexibility closed models can’t match. It’s the anti-hype play in a benchmark-obsessed world.
Dive in today: Fork Qwen on Hugging Face, benchmark against your stack, and prep for DeepSeek V4’s Feb reasoning boost[2]. Is open-source China rewriting the LLM game? Experiment and find out.
Source: TrendForce