The global AI landscape is quietly reshaping. According to the latest data from Hugging Face, in July 2025, the global download volume of open-source large models from China surpassed that of the United States, with Alibaba's Qwen ranking first; at the same time, call data from the third-party API platform OpenRouter shows that Qwen has become the second most popular open-source model globally, second only to Meta's Llama series, surpassing giants like Google and Anthropic.

"Ecosystem breadth" becomes a new standard, GPT-5's cold reception sparks reflection

This trend has drawn high attention from Western tech media. Wired magazine recently published an article stating: "The key to measuring the value of an AI model should not be just how 'smart' it is, but how many real applications it has been used to build." The article directly points out that OpenAI's GPT-5 released in August 2025 failed to ignite enthusiasm in the developer community, as its closed strategy limited ecosystem expansion, while Chinese open-source models like Qwen are becoming the preferred foundation for developers worldwide due to their openness, commercial usability, and ease of deployment.

Open vs. Closed: The divergence of China and US AI strategies becomes evident

Andy Konwinski, founder of Lauder (core contributor to Apache Spark), said in an interview: "Chinese AI companies demonstrate admirable openness— they not only open-source their models but also publicly publish technical papers detailing training techniques and engineering optimizations." He specifically mentioned that a paper by the Qwen team on "dynamically enhancing model intelligence during training" was recognized as one of the best papers at the 2025 NeurIPS conference due to its technological breakthroughs and reproducibility.

In contrast, American tech giants are increasingly moving toward closure: OpenAI no longer discloses model architecture details, Google limits Gemini API capabilities, and Anthropic remains silent about Claude's training data. "They seem more afraid of leaking intellectual property than promoting technological progress," Konwinski criticized.

Qwen's rise: From technical openness to ecological co-building

The global influence of Qwen stems from its full-stack open strategy:

- Comprehensive open-source model series: from Qwen-Max to Qwen-Audio and Qwen2.5-VL, covering scenarios such as language, multimodal, and code;

- Commercial-friendly licensing: allows enterprises to use them free of charge for commercial products;

- Complete toolchain: provides optimization solutions for inference such as vLLM and TensorRT-LLM, lowering the deployment threshold;

- Active community: GitHub stars exceed 80,000, with monthly downloads on Hugging Face exceeding ten million.

Developers are building localized customer service, industrial knowledge bases, educational agents, AI programming assistants, and other applications based on Qwen. Especially in regions with limited computing power, Qwen's efficient inference capabilities have become the preferred choice for "high cost-effectiveness."

AIbase Observation: Those who embrace openness will rule the world; open source equals influence

While American giants are engrossed in the "model arms race," Chinese teams are winning over developers' minds through open collaboration. Qwen's rise is not only a technological victory but also a victory of ecological strategy— the future of AI does not belong to the smartest model, but to the most widely used one.

During the window period when global AI governance rules are yet to be finalized, Chinese open-source forces are seizing the right to define the next generation of intelligent infrastructure with a transparent, shared, and trustworthy posture. This wave driven by the free flow of code may reshape the global technology power map.