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Qwen Surges Ahead: Dominates AI Downloads in December

1/12/2026

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Summary

Story summary

On January 12, 2026, AIBase released a report showing Qwen downloads in December surpassed the combined total of the next eight Hugging Face models, including Meta Platforms, OpenAI, and Zhipu AI and MiniMax.
The report highlights Qwen's dominance in the open-source ecosystem, with tens of thousands of apps developed globally using Qwen.
Alibaba Cloud's Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct was identified as the most downloaded AI model on Hugging Face in October.

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Story summary

On January 12, 2026, AIBase released a report showing Qwen downloads in December surpassed the combined total of the next eight Hugging Face models, including Meta Platforms, OpenAI, and Zhipu AI and MiniMax.
The report highlights Qwen's dominance in the open-source ecosystem, with tens of thousands of apps developed globally using Qwen.
Alibaba Cloud's Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct was identified as the most downloaded AI model on Hugging Face in October.