The hottest AI models aren’t the ones developers actually use

Software developers aren't buying the hype around frontier models.

Nitat Termmee/Getty Images New Hugging Face data shows a gap between the AI models developers talk about and those they use.

Smaller models dominate downloads even though they get little hype online.

The company compared the most-downloaded models with the most-liked models on its platform.

The AI models getting the most attention aren't the ones developers are actually using, according to new data from Hugging Face .

Hugging Face is a platform where developers publish, share, and download AI models.

Users can also "like" models, a signal of interest, while downloads offer a picture of actual usage.

The company compared the 25 models with the most downloads this year with the 25 that received the most likes.

It shows a sharp divide between the models developers are excited about and the ones they actually rely on.

Only one model landed on both lists.

The AI industry tends to obsess over the newest frontier models : the biggest releases, the strongest benchmark scores, and the launches that dominate social media .

Developers, meanwhile, often stick with smaller and older models that are cheap, stable, and already embedded in production systems.

"A like says a release matters," Hugging Face's researchers wrote.

A download, by contrast, can mean a model is "wired into a pipeline that runs on a schedule." All-MiniLM-L6-v2, a fast, light-weight model released in 2021 by Sentence Transformers, was downloaded 1.55 billion times in the first 7 months of 2026 despite receiving just 5,156 likes.