- Qwen3.8-27B overtakes DeepSeek, Meta and other major open-source models on the platform
- The Hangzhou-based AI family is gaining ground overseas as companies seek alternatives to closed models
Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-27B has become the most-liked open-source AI model in the history of Hugging Face, underscoring the growing global reach of the Hangzhou-based tech giant’s model family.
Hugging Face, the world’s largest AI open-source community, updated its “Most likes” ranking on September 16, placing Qwen3.8-27B ahead of models including FLUX.1, DeepSeek-R1, Kimi-K3 and Meta’s Llama 3.
The model has been dubbed a “local Opus 4.6” by overseas developers and has reportedly achieved state-of-the-art performance among models of its size in Code Arena, while also winning praise for its cost-performance ratio.
Less than a month after its open-source release, Silicon Valley startups including Perplexity had selected Qwen3.8-27B as a preferred model for local AI agents, according to Alibaba. Reuters, Airbnb and Pinterest have also adopted Qwen models as companies seek to reduce their reliance on proprietary AI systems.
Qwen’s open-source scale
The latest ranking is part of a broader expansion of Qwen’s open-source ecosystem.
Alibaba says it has released more than 460 Qwen models to date, with cumulative global downloads exceeding 3 billion and more than 300,000 derivative models. The company describes Qwen as the world’s largest open-source model family.
Hugging Face data also points to Qwen’s growing footprint. In the first seven months of 2026, Qwen models were downloaded about 2.045 billion times on the platform — roughly 4.9 times Google’s models and nine times Meta’s.
Qwen had 151,448 derivative models on Hugging Face during the period, 4.7 times the number built on Meta’s Llama models, according to the report.
The numbers suggest that China’s open-source AI competition is increasingly being fought not only on benchmark performance, but also on downloads, derivatives and developer adoption — areas where Qwen is rapidly expanding its global presence.
Header image credit: Qwen
