A new MIT and Hugging Face study, analyzing 2.2 billion downloads on the Hugging Face platform, reveals a major shift in the global AI landscape: Chinese companies have overtaken the dominance that American tech firms held for years.
The study shows that Chinese AI developers have surpassed Americans in download share — 17.1% versus 15.8%. The main drivers of this growth are DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen, which together hold 14.2% of the market from August 2024 to August 2025.
At the same time, former American leaders like Google, Meta, and OpenAI have completely disappeared from the list of most-downloaded models. The most successful American representative is now Comfy, with a 5.4% share.
The research also points to a concerning decline in transparency: the number of models publishing training data fell from 79.3% in 2022 to just 39% in 2025. This indicates that the once open ecosystem is increasingly closing and fragmenting.
This rapid rise of Chinese models marks a shift in the global balance — from American dominance to a new order where Chinese labs lead the development of open AI solutions.
In Brief: Tech World Highlights
- Telegram CEO Pavel Durov launched Cocoon, a decentralized compute network allowing GPU owners to earn TON tokens for private AI processing, challenging traditional cloud providers.
- Sunday Robotics hired at least 10 former Tesla employees — including veterans from the Optimus and Autopilot teams — to help launch the Memo home robot.
- Waves of startups from the Bay Area and secret divisions of big tech companies are reportedly moving away from humanoids and turning to “Pixar-like” robots: compact, expressive robots on wheels.
- Robotic surgery, already a global multi-billion-dollar market, is expected to nearly double by 2029, according to a new report from MassDevice Intelligence.
- Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun stated that the company plans to deploy humanoid robots in all its factories within five years, using AI-driven automation to boost efficiency.
AI Trending Tools:
- Vidi2 – ByteDance’s AI video editor with spatiotemporal “grounding.”
- Runway Gen-4.5 – Runway’s new top-rated video model.
- DeepSeek V3.2 – DeepSeek’s latest powerful open-source release.
