Alibaba’s Qwen Surpasses Meta’s Llama in Global Downloads

The Open-Weight Shift

By September 2025, Alibaba’s Qwen family became the most downloaded language model family on Hugging Face. This marks a major shift in the global AI power dynamic, as enterprises increasingly adopt Chinese-developed base models for fine-tuning.

The Efficiency Factor

Driven by chip embargoes, Chinese developers focused on architectural efficiency, making their models highly attractive for Western companies looking to reduce compute costs.