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” that 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.