HomeAlibaba Qwen tech lead steps down after AI push
Alibaba's Qwen AI project lost a prominent technical leader just one day after the Chinese tech giant unveiled its new Qwen 3.5 open-weight small models.
Junyang Lin, a key technical leader on Alibaba's Qwen team, announced on X Tuesday that he was “stepping down” from the project without providing further details. According to his LinkedIn profile, he joined Alibaba in July 2019 and became part of the Qwen team in April 2023.
The sudden departure—which sparked strong reactions from colleagues and industry partners—occurs as global competition among AI developers intensifies, with companies racing to build models that rival those from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Alibaba's Qwen model family has become one of China's most prominent open-weight AI initiatives, with recent releases achieving benchmark results that often rival those from leading U.S. developers. The Chinese tech giant introduced the model in April 2023 and made it publicly available that September after receiving regulatory clearance.
On Monday, Alibaba introduced the Qwen 3.5 Small Model series, which includes four models with 0.8B, 2B, 4B, and 9B parameters. The company described these systems as native multimodal models designed for applications ranging from on-device AI deployment to lightweight agents. The launch attracted attention from AI community figures, including Elon Musk, who wrote on X that the models demonstrated “impressive intelligence density.”
Lin's departure occurred just as the Qwen team was advancing with new releases, prompting unusually strong reactions from colleagues and partners who described his role as central to the project.
Wenting Zhao, a research scientist on the Qwen team, called Lin's departure “the end of an era,” thanking him in an X post for helping drive the project's progress in open-source AI and engineering. Yuchen Jin, chief technology officer of AI infrastructure startup Hyperbolic, noted that Lin helped connect Qwen with the global developer community, recalling late-night collaboration with the team during model launches. Tiezhen Wang, head of APAC ecosystem at Hugging Face, also described Lin's departure as “an immense loss” for the Qwen project.
The circumstances behind Lin's departure remain unclear. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Chen Cheng, a contributor to the Qwen project, wrote that he was “heartbroken” by the news. In his X post, Cheng appeared to address Lin directly, writing “I know leaving wasn’t your choice” and noting that the team had been working together on model launches just hours earlier.
Binyuan Hui, another member of the Qwen team, has updated his X profile to describe himself as “formerly MTS @Alibaba_Qwen.” However, it remains unclear whether he has left the company or when the change was made.
Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment on the reasons for the departure or on the leadership structure of the Qwen team.
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Alibaba's Qwen AI project lost a prominent technical leader just one day after the Chinese tech giant unveiled its new Qwen 3.5 open-weight small models.
Junyang Lin, a key technical leader on Alibaba's Qwen team, announced on X Tuesday that he was “stepping down” from the project without providing further details. According to his LinkedIn profile, he joined Alibaba in July 2019 and became part of the Qwen team in April 2023.
The sudden departure—which sparked strong reactions from colleagues and industry partners—occurs as global competition among AI developers intensifies, with companies racing to build models that rival those from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Alibaba's Qwen model family has become one of China's most prominent open-weight AI initiatives, with recent releases achieving benchmark results that often rival those from leading U.S. developers. The Chinese tech giant introduced the model in April 2023 and made it publicly available that September after receiving regulatory clearance.
On Monday, Alibaba introduced the Qwen 3.5 Small Model series, which includes four models with 0.8B, 2B, 4B, and 9B parameters. The company described these systems as native multimodal models designed for applications ranging from on-device AI deployment to lightweight agents. The launch attracted attention from AI community figures, including Elon Musk, who wrote on X that the models demonstrated “impressive intelligence density.”
Lin's departure occurred just as the Qwen team was advancing with new releases, prompting unusually strong reactions from colleagues and partners who described his role as central to the project.
Wenting Zhao, a research scientist on the Qwen team, called Lin's departure “the end of an era,” thanking him in an X post for helping drive the project's progress in open-source AI and engineering. Yuchen Jin, chief technology officer of AI infrastructure startup Hyperbolic, noted that Lin helped connect Qwen with the global developer community, recalling late-night collaboration with the team during model launches. Tiezhen Wang, head of APAC ecosystem at Hugging Face, also described Lin's departure as “an immense loss” for the Qwen project.
The circumstances behind Lin's departure remain unclear. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Chen Cheng, a contributor to the Qwen project, wrote that he was “heartbroken” by the news. In his X post, Cheng appeared to address Lin directly, writing “I know leaving wasn’t your choice” and noting that the team had been working together on model launches just hours earlier.
Binyuan Hui, another member of the Qwen team, has updated his X profile to describe himself as “formerly MTS @Alibaba_Qwen.” However, it remains unclear whether he has left the company or when the change was made.
Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment on the reasons for the departure or on the leadership structure of the Qwen team.
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