Alibaba’s Qwen AI technology head resigns following a major push into generative AI

Alibaba’s Qwen AI initiative has lost one of its most prominent technical leaders, only a day after the Chinese technology company introduced its new Qwen 3.5 open-weight small models.

Junyang Lin, a key technical leader within Alibaba’s Qwen team, said in a post on X on Tuesday that he was “stepping down” from the project, but did not provide any further explanation. According to his LinkedIn profile, Lin joined Alibaba in July 2019 and joined the Qwen team in April 2023.

The sudden exit, which prompted strong reactions from colleagues and partners across the industry, comes at a time when competition among AI companies worldwide is intensifying, and developers are racing to build systems capable of competing with models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

Alibaba’s Qwen family of models has become one of the most significant open-weight AI efforts to emerge from China, with recent versions producing benchmark results that have frequently been compared with systems from top U.S. AI labs. Alibaba first introduced the model in April 2023 and made it publicly available in September of that year after obtaining the necessary regulatory approval.

On Monday, Alibaba launched its Qwen 3.5 Small Model series, introducing four models with 0.8B, 2B, 4B, and 9B parameters. The company said these systems are native multimodal models built for a range of use cases, from on-device AI deployment to lightweight agent-based applications. The release attracted attention from people across the AI industry, including Elon Musk, who wrote on X that the models demonstrated “impressive intelligence density.”

Lin’s resignation came just as the Qwen team was continuing to push forward with new model launches, which led to especially strong responses from colleagues and collaborators who portrayed his role in the project as highly central.

Wenting Zhao, a research scientist on the Qwen team, described Lin’s departure as “the end of an era,” and thanked him in a post on X for helping drive the team’s progress in open-source AI and engineering. Yuchen Jin, the chief technology officer of AI infrastructure startup Hyperbolic, said Lin had played an important role in connecting Qwen with the wider global developer community, recalling late-night collaboration with the team during model launches. Tiezhen Wang, head of APAC ecosystem at Hugging Face, also called Lin’s departure “an immense loss” for the Qwen project.

The reasons 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 a post on X that appeared to be directed at Lin, Cheng wrote, “I know leaving wasn’t your choice,” and said the team had still been working together on model launches only hours earlier.

Binyuan Hui, another member of the Qwen team, has also updated his X profile to identify himself as “formerly MTS @Alibaba_Qwen.” However, it is not immediately clear whether he has also left the company or when that profile change was made.