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Now Tracking Qwen: Alibaba Cloud's AI Takes on OpenAI

Published: October 22, 2025 | Reading time: 3 minutes

Published: October 22, 2025 Reading time: 3 minutes Data collection date: October 22, 2025

After Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky revealed they're "relying a lot on Alibaba's Qwen model" because it's "very good... fast and cheap," we immediately added Qwen tracking to Vibe Data. Here's what the actual adoption data shows.

📊 Initial Qwen Adoption Numbers

We're now tracking 17 Qwen packages across NPM and PyPI, plus GitHub repository activity:

NPM Package Downloads (Monthly)

Python Package Downloads (Monthly)

Combined total: 3.3M downloads/month across both ecosystems.

🔍 How This Compares to OpenAI

For context, here's where Qwen stands relative to OpenAI:

Reality check: While Qwen is gaining traction, developer adoption is still a fraction of OpenAI's dominance. The gap between enterprise experimentation (like Airbnb) and widespread developer adoption is massive.

🌏 What Makes Qwen Different

Qwen (通义千问 / Tongyi Qianwen) is Alibaba Cloud's family of large language models, launched in April 2023:

Key Differentiators

  1. Cost: Significantly cheaper than OpenAI for similar performance
  2. Speed: Faster inference times, especially for Chinese language
  3. Licensing: Recent models (Qwen3, QwQ) use Apache 2.0 license
  4. Multimodal: Strong vision-language (VL) and omni-modal capabilities
  5. Local deployment: Available via ModelScope for on-premise use

Qwen Package Ecosystem

📈 Growth Trajectory to Watch

While current adoption is modest, several signals suggest Qwen could grow:

  1. Enterprise adoption: Airbnb publicly switching from OpenAI
  2. Developer tools: Qwen Code CLI launched July 2025 with 188K NPM downloads already
  3. Cost pressure: Teams seeking cheaper alternatives to OpenAI/Anthropic
  4. China market: Dominant position in Chinese-language AI applications
  5. Open licensing: Apache 2.0 removes barriers for commercial use

🔬 What We're Tracking

Our platform now monitors:

💡 Key Insight

Chesky's comment about Qwen being "fast and cheap" reveals a critical tension in AI development: OpenAI's dominance is built on quality, not cost or speed.

As models commoditize and alternatives like Qwen close the quality gap, price-sensitive enterprises will migrate. But the developer ecosystem—where momentum builds—still overwhelmingly favors OpenAI's SDKs.

The migration from OpenAI to alternatives is happening, but it's gradual. Ollama (open-source local models) has 156M NPM downloads/month, showing developers are exploring options. But OpenAI's 3.5B NPM downloads show most production systems haven't switched yet.

🎯 What This Means for Developers

If you're building AI applications:

  1. Monitor Qwen's growth: Early adopters of cost-effective alternatives often gain competitive advantages
  2. Test multi-provider setups: Don't lock into a single LLM provider
  3. Watch enterprise signals: When companies like Airbnb switch, it validates technical viability
  4. Consider total cost: API costs can become your largest infrastructure expense at scale

📊 See the Data

All Qwen adoption metrics are now live on our dashboard at vibe-data.com. Compare Qwen against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other AI providers with real download numbers updated daily.

Vibe Data tracks developer adoption across 90+ AI tools and packages. Our data comes from NPM, PyPI, GitHub, Docker Hub, and major developer marketplaces. All metrics are publicly verifiable.

Track AI tool adoption at vibe-data.com

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