HANGZHOU -- Alibaba's Qwen family of artificial intelligence (AI) models have recorded 700 million downloads on the Hugging Face collaborative AI platform as of this month, making it the most popular open-source AI system worldwide, according to the Qwen team.

Data from Hugging Face show that Qwen had overtaken Meta's Llama in terms of cumulative downloads by October 2025. In December of the same year, its single-month downloads exceeded the combined total of the next eight most popular models -- Meta, DeepSeek, OpenAI, Mistral, Nvidia, Zhipu.AI, Moonshot and MiniMax.

Alibaba open-sourced its Qwen models in 2023, becoming the first major Chinese tech company to release a homegrown large language model (LLM) to the public.

The Qwen family covers both text and multimodal tasks and supports 119 languages and regional dialects.

To date, Alibaba has open-sourced nearly 400 models in its Qwen lineup and spawned more than 180,000 derivative versions. These numbers cement the family as the world's most prolific open LLM, according to the Qwen team.

The team said that since the second half of last year, the global download growth rate of Qwen has ranked first among the five major open-source model vendors.

"Our core goal remains to keep pushing the performance frontier of LLMs while staying committed to open-source openness so that AI can truly help more people around the world," a Qwen team researcher told Xinhua.