Qwen becomes world’s most downloaded AI system with 700 million users

Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen artificial intelligence models have reached 700 million downloads on Hugging Face as of January, making them the most popular open-source AI system worldwide.

Research from consultancy AIBase, released Friday, showed that Qwen’s downloads in December alone were more than the combined downloads of the next eight leading models on the platform. These competing models come from companies like Meta Platforms and OpenAI, along with Chinese companies Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI and MiniMax.

Leading the global open-source market

Alibaba Cloud handles the AI and cloud computing operations for Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post.

The download numbers on Hugging Face confirm Qwen’s spot as the top open-source platform globally.

“Tens of thousands of real-world applications around the globe have been built based on Qwen, marking a historic peak for [Chinese] open-source large models within the international developer community,” the AIBase report stated.

Earlier research from October found that Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct, a smaller version of the model, was the most downloaded AI model on Hugging Face.

On Monday afternoon, Alibaba’s stock price in Hong Kong rose by more than 5 per cent.

The company credits Qwen’s success to its approach of releasing multiple models in different sizes. These range from a small model with 600 million parameters up to much larger ones with tens of billions of parameters.

Parameters are the elements that give an AI system its capabilities, with more parameters usually meaning better performance. By providing different-sized models, developers can pick the one that fits their specific needs.

Bringing AI to consumer products

Alibaba, known for its e-commerce business, has also put Qwen models to work in products aimed at everyday users. These include the Qwen AI assistant that shares the model’s name and A-Fu, a health application from Ant Group.

In December, the Qwen chatbot moved up four positions to reach eighth place on Apple’s China App Store rankings. During that same time period, the A-Fu health app saw an impressive jump in downloads, moving from 94th place all the way to fifth in its category.

Last month, Alibaba, which operates from Hangzhou, created a new division called the Qwen Consumer Business Group. Company vice-president Wu Jia leads this unit, which manages the Qwen chatbot app, the Quark AI assistant and cloud drive, AI hardware products, the UC Browser and Shuqi, an online reading platform.