Methods

How models in the Artifacts Hub are selected, tracked, measured, fingerprinted, and compared.

Data Sources
Editorial selection
Artifacts Log series

Interconnects' monthly recap of notable open-weight releases. Models enter the Hub through these editorial batches.

Models covered
Tracked Models

Interconnects' public list of core LLMs on HuggingFace. These models are the checkpoints we track downloads and RAM scores for, and it powers other projects such as The ATOM Project. Additional multimodal models are included in this site via their coverage in the Artifacts Log series.

Metric source
Hugging Face download counts

Historical data and analysis for core models is powered by the Interconnects API.

Curation by
Florian Brand

Research engineer at Prime Intellect and lead on Artifacts Log.

Nathan Lambert

Founder of a stealth non-profit AI lab; founder and editor of Interconnects AI.

Metrics
Relative Adoption Metric (RAM)
Full methodology
Formula
RAM = Model Downloads / Median of Top 10 in Size Bucket

RAM contextualizes open model downloads across size categories to identify which models are genuinely breaking through in their class. Small models dominate raw download counts, so comparing a 4B model against a 400B model directly is misleading. RAM normalizes by bucket.

A score of 1.0× means a model is tracking to be a top-10 download in its size category. Scores are computed at milestones: 7, 14, 30, 60, 90, 180, and 365 days post-release. Median is used instead of mean to avoid outlier distortion — a single viral model can skew averages by nearly 10×.

Size Buckets
<1B1-5B7-9B10-50B50-100B100-250B250B+
≥10×≥3×≥1×<1×· relative to bucket median
Behavioral Fingerprinting
VAILProject VAIL
Core idea
Fingerprint = compact vector of a model's input–output behavior. Similarity (0–1) reveals shared lineage.

A single base model can spawn hundreds of fine-tunes, merges, and quantizations. Once renamed and redistributed, naming conventions alone can't tell you where a model came from. Behavioral fingerprinting answers that question from the weights themselves.

The method runs a forward pass on fixed input tokens, extracts a linear approximation of the model's mapping from the resulting logits, and reduces it to a unit vector via eigenvalue decomposition. Two models are compared with L1 distance, producing a similarity score between 0 and 1.

Similarity interpretation
0.90 – 1.00Near-identicalSame model, different format
0.80 – 0.90HighFine-tune or distillation
0.65 – 0.80ModerateShared architecture
< 0.65LowIndependently developed
AA Intelligence Index
Full methodology
Composition (v4.1)
Weighted average of 9 evaluations across 4 categories, scored 0–100.

The AA column shows each model's Intelligence Index from Artificial Analysis, who run every evaluation themselves under identical conditions — standardized zero-shot prompts, sandboxed code execution, fixed temperature and token limits — so scores are directly comparable across open and closed models. Agentic tasks (GDPval-AA, τ³-Bench) carry the largest weight, followed by coding (Terminal-Bench, SciCode) and scientific reasoning (HLE, GPQA Diamond).

We cache the score from the Artificial Analysis API once daily and match it to hub models by name. Models AA hasn't benchmarked — most dedicated tools and older releases — show no score. Where AA lists separate reasoning-effort variants, the default configuration's score is shown.

Frontier lag places open models on the closed frontier — the best-score-over-time curve of closed models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI. A lag of 3 months means the best closed model first reached the open model's Intelligence Index score 3 months before the open model shipped. Shown for models scoring above 5 with at least 30B parameters.

Category weights
Agents 34%Coding 24%Scientific reasoning 24%General 18%