Alibaba’s Qwen tech lead steps down after major AI push

Alibaba’s Qwen AI project has lost one of its most visible technical leaders, just a day after the Chinese tech giant unveiled its new Qwen 3.5 open-weight small models.

Junyang Lin, a central technical leader in Alibaba’s Qwen team, said in a post on X on Tuesday that he was “resigning” from the project, without elaborating further. He joined Alibaba in July 2019 and became part of the Qwen team in April 2023. according to to his LinkedIn profile.

The abrupt departure, which drew strong reactions from peers and industry partners, comes as global competition among AI developers intensifies and companies rush to build models that rival those of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

Alibaba’s Qwen family of models has become one of China’s most prominent open-weight AI efforts, with recent releases posting benchmark results that often compete with systems from leading US developers. The Chinese tech giant introduced the model in April 2023 and opened it up for public use in September after receiving regulatory approval.

Alibaba.com introduced the Qwen 3.5 Small Model series on Monday, with four models covering the parameters 0.8B, 2B, 4B and 9B. The systems, the company said, are native multimodal models designed for uses ranging from AI implementation on devices to lightweight agents. The launch attracted the attention of figures from the AI ​​community, including Elon Musk wrote on X that the models showed an ‘impressive intelligence density’.

Lin’s departure came just as the Qwen team was moving forward with new releases, prompting unusually strong reactions from colleagues and partners who identified his role in the project as pivotal.

Wenting Zhao, a researcher on the Qwen team, described Lin’s departure was described as “the end of an era”, thanking him in a post on X for his contribution to the project’s advancement in open source AI and engineering. Yuchen Jin, chief technology officer of AI infrastructure startup Hyperbolic, said Lin helped Qwen connect with the global developer community, recalling working with the team at night during model launches. Tiezhen Wang, head of the APAC ecosystem at Hugging Face, also does described Lin’s departure as “a huge loss” for the Qwen project.

The circumstances surrounding Lin’s departure remain unclear. Lin did not respond to a request for comment.

Chen Cheng, a collaborator on the Qwen project, wrote that he was “heartbroken” by the news. In his post on

Binyuan Hui, another member of the Qwen team, has done just that updated his X profile to describe himself as “formerly MTS @Alibaba_Qwen.” However, it is not immediately clear whether he left the company and when the change took place.

Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment on the reasons for the move or on the Qwen team’s leadership structure.