How One Person Can Drive Enormous Change

Liftr Insights has been tracking a wide range of AI and ML projects. Among them, PyTorch Image Models (Timm) stands out. With over 160 million downloads in February 2025, Timm has emerged as the most popular computer vision library. That figure marks a 199% increase over December 2024, highlighting a dramatic surge in adoption. But what’s driving this rapid acceleration? 

Tabular data models demonstrate an unsung portion of AI model universe by managing complex data

There are models downloaded 8x more, on average, than the traditional types of models you know. And, no, it's not a model from DeepSeek, OpenAI, Google, X, or Meta.

Our first article about AI discussed how recent AI events from China challenge the mainstream understanding of AI. Another prevalent misconception, especially outside of the technology space, is that generative AI encompasses the entire AI category of models, and that is not the case. For instance, one of the most popular types of open-source AI models gets eight times as many downloads as the average open-source natural language processing ("NLP") model. Interestingly, most people have never heard of it. It doesn't appear on hot AI trends lists. In fact, there are over 750 NLP models for every one of these types of models.

Analysts are blinded by DeepSeek and OpenAI and missing the depth of data revealed by Liftr Insights

In January 2025, the announcement of a new AI model called DeepSeek R1 significantly impacted U.S. financial markets. This China-developed large language model raised investor alarms due to its performance and the claims that it was built for about $6M USD, compared to the hundreds of millions invested in the more well-known U.S frontier models such as OpenAI and Gemini.