Alibaba Overtakes Google and Meta With 3 Billion AI Model Downloads | PYMNTS.com

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…