AI BriefingObservation Report on the State of Open Models in Summer 2026
Key point
As of summer 2026, Chinese research labs are surpassing the US by successively releasing ultra-large-scale open models.
Details
The Hugging Face Hub ecosystem is expanding rapidly every day. As of summer 2026, there are 2.96 million public model repositories, 1 million datasets, and 1.44 million Spaces. However, a severe concentration phenomenon is occurring, with 99.2% of total downloads focused on the top 1.5% of repositories.
The most notable point is that the Frontier of open models is shifting rapidly. In the past, scale was gradually increased starting from small models, but in 2026, several Chinese research labs are showing a trend of skipping this process and directly releasing ultra-large models.
In fact, for most months in 2026, the model sizes from Chinese research labs overwhelmed those from US research labs.
- Chinese research labs: Released models with a maximum monthly size of 754B ~ 2.78T parameters
- US research labs: Mostly under 130B in size (with exceptions such as NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra at 561B and Thinking Machines' Inkling)
This summary was generated automatically by AI. Check the original for the author's claims and context. Copyright belongs to the original author.
Our guide explains how the AI works. Report summary errors, attribution issues, or removal requests via Contact.