Open-weight models from China’s Alibaba have reportedly become the world’s top artificial intelligence offerings. The company’s models have seen more than 3 billion downloads worldwide over the last six months, surpassing those of Meta, Google and Alibaba’s Chinese competitors like DeepSeek, Bloomberg News reported Saturday (Aug. 15). Alibaba told Bloomberg in a statement that Qwen, its family of AI models, has open-sourced upwards of 460 models and its ecosystem has issued 300,000-plus derivatives. The report also cited findings from open-source AI hub Hugging Face which show that Google had 418 million downloads for the year, with 227 million for Meta. As Bloomberg noted, open-source AI models can be used to create new AI products, making adoption a measure of which technologies are popular with developers. That has made download and derivate-model numbers a way to gauge influence in the competition between Chinese and American AI companies, the report added. The popularity of Qwen indicates that strategy is enjoying traction outside China, Bloomberg wrote.

Full report : Alibaba says its new open-source multimodal model, Qwen3.8-27B, passed 1 million plus downloads within a few days of release, making it one of its fastest-growing models.