Open-Source AI Dominates: Alibaba Qwen Leads Downloads

Open-source AI models are rapidly gaining ground, with Alibaba's Qwen family surpassing one billion downloads in January. This makes it the most-downloaded open model globally, even ahead of Meta Platforms' Llama line. What's happening is that open-weight models are now rivaling closed frontier models, especially for coding tasks, but at a much lower cost. For example, Nebius Group reports one customer cut inference costs up to 26 times. Cloudflare now serves over 70 models at the edge. This shift means the model itself is becoming a commodity. The value is moving to the services that support and run these models. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella describes this as a divide between "human capital and token capital." The ROBO Global Artificial Intelligence Index, or THNQ, holds companies spanning both open-model makers and the infrastructure beneath them. The bottom line is that the cost of intelligence is falling fast, and investors need to know where the new value is being created.