Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen family is the world’s most widely used open source AI system as of January, Hugging Face data shows
Alibaba Cloud’s premier Qwen series of AI models has broken the 700 million downloads mark as of January on the developer platform Hugging Face, making it the leading open source AI platform in the world.
As per research published by Interconnects.ai, based on data shared by Hugging Face, the collective downloads of the subsequent eight most popular models, along with the downloads of Meta Platforms Inc. and Open AI, were surpassed by the downloads of QWEN in December alone. Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, & MiniMax, which are Chinese firms, were also in the list.
Alibaba Cloud is the artificial intelligence and cloud computing services division of Alibaba Group Holding, which also owns the South China Morning Post.
Qwen downloads on the Hugging Face website further solidified it in the top position in the world’s ecosystem.
“Tens of thousands of practical applications have been developed on Qwen around the world, reaching a historical climax of open source large models among Chinese developers,” AIBase, a consulting company, cited as saying in another report referring to the same data.
As published in an October study, Alibaba’s Cloud’s Qwen2.5 1.5B Instruct, a lightweight model, was the most widely downloaded model from Hugging Face.
Stocks of Alibaba in Hong Kong have appreciated by over 5 per cent in the afternoon trading on Monday.
The reason for the success Qwen experienced was the result of Alibaba Cloud’s plan for opening source various models of different sizes, some as low as a model having 600 million parameters, while others have tens of billions.
Parameters are the variables that represent the “intelligence” of an AI model, where a higher number of variables represent greater capability. A range of AI models that cater to distinct needs has given designers the ability to pick model sizes according to their requirements.
Alibaba, the China based e commerce giant, and its subsidiaries have also incorporated the Qwen models into other consumer-oriented products such as the AI companion tool by Qwen, named Qwen, and the health app "A Fu" by Ant Group.
Qwen in December rose four ranks to the eighth position in Apple’s App Store in the China market place.
The downloads of another health app, A Fu, surged to the fifth position from 94th among the most downloaded apps.
Recently, a new entity has been established within this company, named Qwen Consumer Business Group, with Wu Jia, a vice president of this company, as its head, which aims at managing chat robot app Qwen, Quark AI assistant and cloud drive, AI related hardware devices, UC Browser, and online reading platform Shuqi among others.
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