State of open source One in five Spaces runs on an open model, and those Spaces get 37% of all visits
Most Spaces that use an open model are chatbots and text tools. The visits go elsewhere: image, video and editing apps draw a much bigger share of traffic than their share of Spaces.
Space creation: more Spaces, and a different mix
New Spaces per month by SDK. These counts only include Spaces that still exist, so older months are undercounted relative to recent ones.
New Spaces per month, by SDK
Docker passed Gradio in 2026. The huge static spike in late 2025 came mostly from AI website builders, not hand-written sites.
Source: internal Space records, Mar 2022 – Sep 2026. Spaces with no SDK set (<1%) are left out.
AI website builders behind the static surge
of the static Spaces created in Oct 2025 were tagged by an AI site builder (DeepSite, AnyCoder, QwenSite).
Source: public hub-stats snapshot (cfahlgren1/hub-stats), Oct 19 2026. Public Spaces only.
Share of new public Spaces that link an open model
It fell to about 12% while AI-built websites flooded in during 2025, then recovered to 22–27% in 2026.
A Space "links" a model when its metadata lists a public Hub model.
What apps people build
New public Spaces per quarter by what the app is for, in the style of AI World's models-by-category chart. Labels come from keyword rules over each Space's name, title and description; the roughly half of Spaces too generic to label are left out.
New Spaces per quarter, by app typeHub data
Public Spaces that still exist (hub-stats, Oct 19 2026), labeled ones only. Paper-reproduction logbooks are left out. Q3 2026 is lower partly because browser-made Space creation fell (see Agents tab).
The mix, 2024 vs 2026Hub data
Share of labeled new public Spaces created in 2024 and in Jan–Sep 2026.
What open models are used for: Spaces built vs visits received
For each task or category, compare its share of Spaces that use open models with its share of the visits those Spaces got over the last 12 months. A visits bar longer than the Spaces bar means the use case gets more traffic than its size suggests.
By task of the linked model
Text generation is 39% of open-model Spaces but gets only 10% of their visits. Image-to-video and image-to-image Spaces average 6.5k and 4.0k visits a year, vs 277 for text generation.
Top 16 tasks by Space count. A Space linking several models counts under each task it uses.
By app category
Chatbots are 26% of categorized open-model Spaces but get 5.5% of visits. Image generation, video generation and image editing are 16% of Spaces and get 45% of visits.
Categories are AI-generated labels. Spaces that are uncategorized (52%) or labeled "Other" are left out.
Gradio is how open models get shipped
42% of public Gradio Spaces link an open model, compared with 11% of Docker Spaces. Docker Spaces still get the most visits overall.
Which models, from whom
Each quarter's share of newly created Spaces that link an open model, broken down by the linked model's task and by its author.
Task mix of new open-model Spaces
Text generation peaked at 59% in Q1 2025. Image-text-to-text (vision-language models) has tripled since then, and image-to-video keeps growing.
% of new public Spaces linking an open model, per quarter. Q3 2026 is incomplete; see notes.
Model authors in new open-model Spaces
Qwen jumped to a third of new open-model Spaces in Q1 2025 and is still first at about 24%. OpenAI's gpt-oss lifted OpenAI to 11–16% from Q3 2025.
% of new open-model Spaces linking at least one model from that author.
Model size, weighted by Space links
Most Spaces use small models: 44% of links go to models under 1B parameters.
License of linked models
56% of Space-to-model links point to models with an OSI-style license (Apache, MIT and similar). 30% point to open-weight models under custom licenses.
Share of all Space-to-model links. Custom licenses include Llama, Gemma, OpenRAIL and "other".
Top open models in Spaces
The most-linked models are mostly copied from templates. The most-visited ones are image and video models.
Qwen2.5-Coder-32B's count is probably inflated by people duplicating course template Spaces. Visits are the last 12 months, summed across the Spaces that link each model.
Space traffic
Visits are counted on Space pages and the data starts in Nov 2023.
Space visits per month
Visits peaked at 113M in Jun 2026, about 3× the late-2023 level.
All Spaces, public and private.
Spaces getting at least one visit per month
Up from 48k to 323k. The long tail is getting longer.
Distinct Spaces with at least one visit in the month.
Hardware: Spaces with vs without an open model
Status today: Spaces with vs without an open model
Current runtime stage from the Hub API (Oct 19 2026). Sleeping Spaces wake up when someone visits.
