mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

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

arXiv 2512.03073 ↗First posted 27 Nov 2025cs.CY cs.AIcited by 4

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Abstract (arXiv)

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.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 25 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Nov 2025.

Builds on

25 of 47 references.

References · 25

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
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  5. 2015Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Networkcited by 10,076
  6. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,049
  7. 2015You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detectioncited by 4,829
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  9. 2019Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLPcited by 4,195
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  11. 2023AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Accelerationcited by 1,234
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13 more
  1. 2020AdapterHub: A Framework for Adapting Transformerscited by 441
  2. 2020MixKD: Towards Efficient Distillation of Large-scale Language Modelscited by 65
  3. 2023An Empirical Study of Pre-Trained Model Reuse in the Hugging Face Deep Learning Model Registrycited by 45
  4. 2025We Should Chart an Atlas of All the World's Modelscited by 25
  5. 2023Market Concentration Implications of Foundation Modelscited by 15
  6. 2025Anatomy of a Machine Learning Ecosystem: 2 Million Models on Hugging Facecited by 12
  7. 2024Ecosystem of Large Language Models for Codecited by 10
  8. 2023On the Suitability of Hugging Face Hub for Empirical Studiescited by 8
  9. 2024What do we know about Hugging Face? A systematic literature review and quantitative validation of qualitative claimscited by 8
  10. 2023"I see models being a whole other thing": An Empirical Study of Pre-Trained Model Naming Conventions and A Tool for Enhancing Naming Consistencycited by 7
  11. 2025AI Supply Chains: An Emerging Ecosystem of AI Actors, Products, and Servicescited by 7
  12. 2024Towards Semantic Versioning of Open Pre-trained Language Model Releases on Hugging Facecited by 6
  13. 2024How do Machine Learning Models Change?cited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

  1. 2026The ATOM Report: Measuring the Open Language Model Ecosystemcited by 2
  2. 2026Evaluation of Agents under Simulated AI Marketplace Dynamicscited by 1
  3. 2026Discovering Hidden Gems in Model Repositoriescited by 0
  4. 2026Ventor-QTest: Threat-Model-Driven Verification of Vendor-Hosted LLM APIscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026The Open Source Economic Index of AI Adoption and Capability
  2. 2026The End of the Foundation Model Era: Open-Weight Models, Sovereign AI, and Inference as Infrastructure
  3. 2025GDPval: Evaluating AI Model Performance on Real-World Economically Valuable Tasks
  4. 2026The Oligarch Barely Steers Model Collapse in Multi-Model Ecosystems
  5. 2026Can Open-Weight Models Compete on Financial Text Comprehension?
  6. 2025Intern-S1: A Scientific Multimodal Foundation Model
  7. 2026State of AI: An Empirical 100 Trillion Token Study with OpenRouter
  8. 2023Bridging the Digital Divide: Performance Variation across Socio-Economic Factors in Vision-Language Models