We've been monitoring a decline in HuggingFace downloads across the top open LLMs we track for interconnects. It looks like there was a slight change in counting of downloads, as we saw a ~30% download rate drop for many top models, but this is continuing over time. What else do people think it may be?

What happened

We've been monitoring a decline in HuggingFace downloads across the top open LLMs we track for interconnects. It looks like there was a slight change in counting of downloads, as we saw a ~30% download rate drop for many top models, but this is continuing over time. What else do people think it may be?

The story so far

Nathan Lambert said Interconnects updated its model-download tracking pipeline to include local models in formats such as GGUF, AWQ, and ONNX, fixing a gap in the methodology behind its earlier report of declining Hugging Face downloads. He said downloads of those previously excluded models are now surging. Lambert had reported a continuing decline among the top open LLMs Interconnects tracked, with many showing roughly a 30% drop in download rate. He initially suggested a change in download counting might explain the drop. His later explanation identified the exclusion of local models, which he said had previously been harder to track and accounted for a much smaller share of downloads.

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