Alibaba’s Qwen powers top 10 open-source models as China AI know-how goes beyond DeepSeek

Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen artificial intelligence (AI) model is powering the world’s top 10 open-source large language models (LLMs), according to collaborative machine-learning platform and community Hugging Face.

The latest Open LLM Leaderboard by Hugging Face showed that all of the top-ranked models were trained and developed on the updated open-source versions of Qwen, part of the Tongyi Qianwen LLM family built by Alibaba’s cloud computing services and AI arm. Hangzhou-based Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

At least seven of the top 10 open-source LLMs were based on the Qwen2.5-72b series from Alibaba Cloud. The top-ranked LLM, calme-3.2-instruct-78b, described itself as “an advanced iteration of Qwen2.5-72b”, which was fine-tuned on custom data sets to enhance its capabilities in generic domains.

LLM is the technology underpinning generative AI (GenAI) services like ChatGPT. GenAI refers to the algorithms that can be used to create new content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations and videos.

Open source gives public access to a software program’s source code, allowing third-party developers to modify or share its design, fix broken links or scale up its capabilities. Open-source technologies have been a huge contributor to China’s flourishing tech industry over the past few decades.

Qwen’s sway on the development of LLMs in the latest Hugging Face open-source rankings reflects the increasing depth of China’s AI capabilities beyond DeepSeek’s recent breakthrough.

  

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