---
title: "Time-decayed rankings for model popularity"
date: 2026-06-22
canonical: https://solmaz.io/x/2068954708421525930/
x_url: https://x.com/onusoz/status/2068954708421525930
license: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
---

For my recent LLM leaderboard https://osolmaz-leaderboard.hf.space/, I sum up all time total downloads (or likes) across model variants, and then divide it by the age of that model. I.e. "time decay" for popularity

This gives a more time-agnostic metric for the popularity of that model. In an ideal ranking, older models that are not popular anymore should be demoted, like 2 year old Llama 3 models. If you don't do that, they might still occupy top 10 needlessly, despite having been replaced by e.g. qwen in practice

Thanks to that, qwen-3-6b which came up 1 year ago and has 150m downloads can surpass llama-3-1-8b which came up 2 years ago and has 200m downloads

More notes on my post: https://solmaz.io/popularity-ranking