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.
开放智能的经济学：追踪模型生态系统中的权力与参与 / Economies of Open Intelligence: Tracing Power & Participation in the Model Ecosystem
这篇论文通过分析Hugging Face平台超过85万个AI模型的下载数据和元数据，揭示了开放模型经济中权力格局的重大转变：美国科技巨头的统治地位正被独立开发者、社区组织以及以DeepSeek和Qwen为代表的中国产业力量所削弱，同时模型规模、多模态能力等技术特性快速演进，但数据透明度却在下降。