Chinese labs lead frontier AI; Qwen dominates open models · 1 source tracked

A new report from HuggingFace indicates a significant shift in the open-source AI landscape, with Chinese labs now dominating the frontier of large model development, releasing models with up to 2.78 trillion parameters under permissive licenses like Apache 2.0 and MIT. The Qwen model family has emerged as the community's preferred base for derivative works, far surpassing Meta's Llama and Gemma in terms of derivative models and downloads. Despite high attention for some models, actual adoption, measured by downloads, heavily favors smaller, older models, with under-1B parameter models accounting for the vast majority of all-time downloads. AI

IMPACT Chinese labs are setting the pace for frontier open models, with Qwen becoming the de facto base for derivatives, potentially reshaping the open-source AI ecosystem.

RANK_REASON Report on shifts in open-source AI model development and adoption trends. [lever_c_demoted from significant: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on dev.to — LLM tag →

• AMD
• Claude Code
• DeepSeek
• Gemma
• GLM-5.2
• Inkling
• Llama
• Meta
• Nemotron Ultra
• NVIDIA
• Qwen
• Thinking Machines
• Z.ai

• model release
• other

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