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Google Research
OpenAIData Provenance InitiativeEdinburghHuggingFaceScaDS.AI LeipzigUNC at Chapel HillUSCNov 27, 2025arXiv:2512.03073This paper analyzes the Hugging Face Model Hub download history from June 2020 to August 2025, encompassing 851,000 models and 2.2B downloads, to understand concentration dynamics in the open model economy. The study reveals a shift away from US industry dominance by Google, Meta, and OpenAI towards unaffiliated developers, community organizations, and Chinese industry players like DeepSeek and Qwen. The analysis also identifies trends in model properties, including increased model size, multimodal generation, quantization, and MoE architectures, alongside decreased data transparency.
US dominance in open-weight AI models is fading fast, with Chinese industry and independent developers now vying for control of the model economy.
Since 2019, the Hugging Face Model Hub has been the primary global platform for sharing open weight AI models. By releasing a dataset of the complete history of weekly model downloads (June 2020-August 2025) alongside model metadata, we provide the most rigorous examination to-date of concentration dynamics and evolving characteristics in the open model economy. Our analysis spans 851,000 models, over 200 aggregated attributes per model, and 2.2B downloads. We document a fundamental rebalancing of economic power: US open-weight industry dominance by Google, Meta, and OpenAI has declined sharply in favor of unaffiliated developers, community organizations, and, as of 2025, Chinese industry, with DeepSeek and Qwen models potentially heralding a new consolidation of market power. We identify statistically significant shifts in model properties, a 17X increase in average model size, rapid growth in multimodal generation (3.4X), quantization (5X), and mixture-of-experts architectures (7X), alongside concerning declines in data transparency, with open weights models surpassing truly open source models for the first time in 2025. We expose a new layer of developer intermediaries that has emerged, focused on quantizing and adapting base models for both efficiency and artistic expression. To enable continued research and oversight, we release the complete dataset with an interactive dashboard for real-time monitoring of concentration dynamics and evolving properties in the open model economy.
