Forecasting Open-Weight AI Model Growth on HuggingFace

As the open-weight AI landscape continues to proliferate-with model development, significant investment, and user interest-it becomes increasingly important to predict which models will ultimately drive innovation and shape AI ecosystems. Building on parallels with citation dynamics in scientific literature, we propose a framework to quantify how an open-weight model's influence evolves. Specifically, we adapt the model introduced by Wang et al. for scientific citations, using three key parameters-immediacy, longevity, and relative fitness-to track the cumulative number of fine-tuned models of an open-weight model. Our findings reveal that this citation-style approach can effectively capture the diverse trajectories of open-weight model adoption, with most models fitting well and outliers indicating unique patterns or abrupt jumps in usage.

@article{bhandari2025_2502.15987,
  title={ Forecasting Open-Weight AI Model Growth on HuggingFace },
  author={ Kushal Raj Bhandari and Pin-Yu Chen and Jianxi Gao },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.15987},
  year={ 2025 }
}