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Qwen's dominance on Hugging Face dips slightly as older models surge

By PulseAugur Editorial · [1 sources] ·

A recent analysis of Hugging Face's Top 300 most-downloaded text-generation models reveals that Qwen's share has slightly decreased from 55.8% to 50.9% between September and November 2026. However, Qwen still represents half of all downloads, with its own Qwen3 checkpoints being among the most popular. The study also noted a significant increase in downloads for the older openai-community/gpt2 model, which, if excluded, shows a smaller decline for Qwen. Other models like Gemma saw a notable drop in share, while DeepSeek and GLM experienced growth. AI

IMPACT Provides insight into the current popularity and shifting trends of open-source LLMs, influencing developer choices and resource allocation.

RANK_REASON Analysis of download trends on Hugging Face, not a primary release or significant industry event.

Read on dev.to — LLM tag →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

Qwen's dominance on Hugging Face dips slightly as older models surge

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12 / 100
Composite score across the factors below. Higher = stronger signal that this story matters right now.
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Commentary
Analysis of download trends on Hugging Face, not a primary release or significant industry event.
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Only one publisher covered this so far. Single-source stories can still rank when the publisher is high-authority, but they lack cross-source corroboration.
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model release, other
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High
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Breaking (< 6h)
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. dev.to — LLM tag TIER_1 English(EN) · AI OpenFree ·

    Qwen Still Takes Half of Open-LLM Downloads: What Changed in the Hugging Face Top 300 Since September

    <h2> TL;DR </h2> <p><strong>Is Qwen losing its grip on open-model downloads?</strong> A little, and less than the headline number suggests. We compared two snapshots of the 300 most-downloaded <code>text-generation</code> models on Hugging Face, taken on September 17 and November…

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