Economies of Open Intelligence: Tracing Power & Participation in the Model Ecosystem

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the evolving landscape of open-weight AI models on Hugging Face, revealing shifts in economic power, technological advancements, and transparency issues over a six-year period, supported by a comprehensive dataset.

Contribution

It provides the first rigorous, data-driven examination of the open model economy's dynamics, including power shifts, technological trends, and transparency concerns, with an extensive dataset and interactive tools.

Findings

US dominance declined in favor of community and Chinese developers.

Model sizes increased 17-fold, with growth in multimodal and mixture-of-experts architectures.

Transparency in data decreased, with open weights surpassing open source models in 2025.

Abstract

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.