Hugging Face Summer 2026: Chinese labs ship the biggest open models, but small models drive real usage

State of Open Models: Summer 2026 Observations

Hugging Face's biannual report covers Jan–Aug 2026. Chinese labs released the largest open models almost every month, ranging from 754B to 2.78T parameters, while US labs mostly stayed under 130B except for NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra (561B) and Thinking Machines Lab's Inkling. Attention doesn't equal adoption: 85.6% of models have under 200 lifetime downloads, and 1.5% of repos account for 99.2% of downloads. Qwen is now the community's go-to base model, small models remain the practical layer, and agents are emerging as the new user of models.

Why it matters: Hugging Face's biannual ecosystem report with concrete numbers and a US-China comparison framework hits all three HKR axes. Deduction because it's a survey, not a primary release, and the body only gives an excerpt — full data requires clicking through.