Alibaba's Qwen tops Hugging Face downloads at 52%

Alibaba's Qwen family now leads the free-model race by a wide margin, according to Yahoo Finance's tally of maker-traceable downloads on Hugging Face. The same data shows how far Meta has slipped: Llama 4 and Qwen3 launched the same month in 2025, yet developers have downloaded Qwen3 more than 20 times as often on Ollama, a popular app for running AI locally.

The download advantage matters because free models are becoming the default for cost-sensitive AI products. Duolingo's CEO said each AI practice call in his app used to cost about 30 cents and is now "less than a cent" after moving most of it to open-weight models. Decagon's CEO said new customers run "almost entirely" on them.

That shift has a geopolitical edge. Economist Nouriel Roubini said Chinese open models are about 95% as good as American ones, partly because "we allowed distillation" and because advanced chips reached China through Singapore. Alibaba stock fell 7% Thursday to its lowest close since January 2025 as reports circulated that Washington is moving to shut down that Singapore route. The US investigation targets Megaspeed, a Singapore company that rents out Nvidia-based computing power and denies diverting chips; Alibaba was its founding customer and remains its biggest, the Financial Times reported.