---
title: "Popularity rankings for open models"
date: 2026-06-20
canonical: https://solmaz.io/x/2068380321629032850/
x_url: https://x.com/onusoz/status/2068380321629032850
license: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
---

I created an LLM leaderboard based on Hugging Face download and like counts, grouped, filtered and time-averaged. Top 5 downloads is shared by @Alibaba_Qwen and @googlegemma 👑🤝👑

Top 5 likes, on the other hand also includes @deepseek_ai V4 Pro 👑

Even @OpenAI makes it to #8 top downloads with gpt-oss-20b 👑

qwen3-6-35b-a3b is the second most CIRCULATED LLM of this year, with an average of 21 million downloads per month, since the day it was released 2 months ago 📈📈📈

Despite first place belonging to 8mo old qwen3-vl-2b-instruct, the highlight belongs to the mid-sized MoE model, which has hit a size/performance sweet spot so hard that it absolutely 💥 SHATTERED 💥 Hugging Face leaderboards in the 2 months since it has launched 

qwen3-6-35b-a3b is followed closely by its dense sibling 27b --- and then the mid-sized gemma 4 models 26b-a4b and 31b

Note that a model's distribution is inversely proportional to its size, but not strictly! Usefulness plays a factor as well, since gemma 4 26b-a4b is being downloaded more than the smaller gemma 4 e4b

I created this leaderboard because Hugging Face's all time highest downloads and likes did not give me enough information about what is really popular, neither today, nor all-time. I wanted something in between

How do I calculate this ranking?

- Get models that with n_downloads >= 100k
- Exclude models older than 1 year
- Deduplicate and group quantizations and variants of the same model based on slug prefix heuristics
- For each group, sum up total downloads of all time
- Sort by descending total_downloads / age = average_downloads_per_day (can also sort w.r. to likes per month)
- Repeat every day to get the most up to date ranking

More info and source on the leaderboard page, hosted on a Hugging Face space: https://osolmaz-leaderboard.hf.space/

This is a work in progress, please reply below if you see a model that should be there is missing, or any other mistakes