Alibaba’s Qwen tech leader resigns 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 small open weight models.

Junyang Lin, core technical leader of Alibaba’s Qwen team, saying in a post on X on Tuesday that he would “resign” from the project, without elaborating. He joined Alibaba in July 2019 and joined the Qwen team in April 2023. according to your LinkedIn profile.

The abrupt departure, which sparked strong reactions from colleagues and industry partners, comes as global competition among AI developers intensifies, with companies racing 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 showing benchmark results that often rival systems from leading American developers. The Chinese tech giant unveiled the model in April 2023 and opened it to public use in September after receiving regulatory clearance.

Alibaba inserted its Qwen 3.5 Small Model series on Monday, with four models covering parameters 0.8B, 2B, 4B and 9B. The systems, the company said, are native multimodal models designed for uses ranging from on-device AI deployment to lightweight agents. The launch caught the attention of figures in the AI ​​community, including Elon Musk, who wrote in X that the models showed an “impressive density of intelligence.”

Lin’s departure came just as the Qwen team was pressing ahead with new releases, prompting unusually strong reactions from colleagues and partners who described his role in the project as central.

Wenting Zhao, a research scientist on the Qwen team, described Lin’s departure as “the end of an era”, thanking him in a post on X for helping drive the project’s advances in open source engineering and artificial intelligence. Yuchen Jin, CTO of AI infrastructure startup Hyperbolic, saying Lin helped connect Qwen to the global developer community, recalling nightly collaboration with the team during model releases. Tiezhen Wang, head of Hugging Face’s APAC ecosystem, also described Lin’s departure is “an immense loss” for the Qwen project.

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

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

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

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