Model repository in Hugging Face has followed an exponential trajectory from 2022 to 2025. The growth, initially gradual and slow, accelerated into a steep arc as contributors worldwide pushed the boundaries of open Machine Learning. As the stacked chart shows above, the curve bends sharply upward after 2023, revealing not just momentum but also velocity, especially striking as we look back at the close of 2025!
Over four years, the repository accumulated more than two million models. The pace itself became part of the story: the first million took over 1,000 days from the start of model tracking in March 2022, while the second million arrived only 335 days later. Cutting the time by roughly 65% showed how quickly innovation can scale once infrastructure and community practices reach critical mass. Across this period, several landmark releases marked clear shifts in momentum: Bloom opened 2022’s wave of large collaborative models; LLaMA 2 and Qwen2 reshaped the open-weights landscape through 2023-2024, and 2024-2025 saw the rise of giants like Flux 1.0, DeepSeek-R1, GPT-OSS, and Kimi K2. Each of these contributed to the accelerating curve, not as isolated milestones, but as stepping stones in a rapidly maturing ecosystem.
By August 27, 2025, the number of models added this year had already surpassed the entire total added in 2024. This is a milestone that marked a clear break from previous growth patterns and meant a shift from steady to rapid expansion driven by easier tooling, broader expertise, a global 'appetite' for customization, smaller parameter count and other community trends. The turning point in 2024 correlated with the widespread adoption of small fine-tuned models: lighter models created a loop where more people could contribute, which in turn accelerated the pace of releases.
Together, these trends show the amazing power of open source development. It's important to note that it's not only about model quantity, but also about the collective refinement of quality, an ecosystem where collaboration amplifies each other over time. As 2025 wraps up, it's clear that the three-million model milestone will be quickly broken in 2026; but the real story will be whether a new wave of open systems emerges that doesn’t just match proprietary models, but quietly (and finally!) moves beyond them.