Trending models on Hugging Face: Qwen 3.8 lost 622K downloads this week, its 9x-compressed fork gained 480K

1. Laya (convaiinnovations) – 0.4B text classification, 2.23K likes, zero downloads logged. Four days old, likes-driven trend, not usage
2. Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B (prism-ml) – 27B, 2.57M downloads, 1.82K likes. Qwen 3.8 compressed 9x to 5.9 GB via ternary weights
3. Qwen-Image-2.1 (Qwen) – 7B text-to-image, 16.2K downloads, 1.66K likes
4. Xing4.0-29B (XingChen-AGI) – 31B text generation, 30.6K downloads, 1.25K likes
5. Qwen-Image-2.1-GGUF (abenzerps) – 7B quantized fork of #3, 182K downloads, 884 likes

Ternary Bonsai 2 pulled 2.57M downloads in 5 days – a 27B model compressed to 5.9 GB that retains 98.2% of Qwen 3.8's benchmark scores. Builders are choosing the 9x smaller version over the original.

Qwen 3.8 itself – the full 27B original – dropped from rank 5 to rank 7 and shed 622K downloads week-over-week. A compressed version from ISTA-DASLab gained 480K in the same window. Builders are trading the full model for the lighter one.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash sits at #6 with 542K downloads – the same model topping OpenRouter's usage charts. There's the split in one sentence: DeepSeek Flash gets rented through an API by the token, bonsai gets downloaded and run locally.

Anthropic shipped Opus 5.5 today – 40% cheaper to run than Opus 5, leading every agentic coding benchmark. Meanwhile on Hugging Face, builders are pulling 11.9M downloads across the top 10 trending models that cost nothing.