The ATOM Report: Measuring the Open Language Model Ecosystem
Nathan Lambert, Florian Brand
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Why It Matters
Maps the open-model ecosystem across downloads, derivatives, inference share, and performance, useful for choosing which families are winning real adoption rather than just benchmarks.
Abstract
We present a comprehensive adoption snapshot of the leading open language models and who is building them, focusing on the ~1.5K mainline open models from the likes of Alibaba's Qwen, DeepSeek, Meta's Llama, that are the foundation of an ecosystem crucial to researchers, entrepreneurs, and policy advisors. We document a clear trend where Chinese models overtook their counterparts built in the U.S. in the summer of 2025 and subsequently widened the gap over their western counterparts. We study a mix of Hugging Face downloads and model derivatives, inference market share, performance metrics and more to make a comprehensive picture of the ecosystem.