Alibaba’s Qwen technology chief resigns after major AI push

Alibaba’s Qwen AI project has lost one of its most prominent technology leaders, a day after the Chinese tech giant unveiled its new Qwen 3.5 open compact model.

Junyang Lin, the central technical leader of Alibaba’s Qwen team, said in a post on X on Tuesday that he was “resigning” from the project, without elaborating. 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 has received a strong response from peers and industry partners, comes as global competition among AI developers intensifies and companies race to build models that rival the likes of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

Alibaba’s Qwen family of models has emerged as one of China’s most prominent open AI efforts, with recent releases publishing benchmark results that often rival systems from leading U.S. developers. The Chinese tech giant launched the model in April 2023 and made it available to the public in September of that year after receiving regulatory clearance.

Alibaba on Monday launched the Qwen 3.5 small model series, consisting of four models covering 0.8B, 2B, 4B and 9B parameters. According to the company, the system is a basic multi-mode model designed for a variety of uses, from on-device AI deployments to lightweight agents. The launch attracted the attention of figures in the AI ​​community, including Elon Musk, who wrote in X that the model demonstrated “impressive intelligence density.”

Lin’s resignation came as the Qwen team was pushing a new release, sparking an unusually strong reaction from colleagues and partners who described his role in the project as central.

Wenting Zhao, a researcher on the Qwen team, described Lin’s departure as “the end of an era” and thanked him in a post on X for fostering the advancement of projects in open source AI and engineering. Yuchen Jin, chief technology officer at AI infrastructure startup Hyperbolic, said Lin helped connect Qwen with a global developer community and recalled late-night collaborations with the team during model launches. Tiezhen Wang, Hugging Face’s head of APAC ecosystem, also 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 contributor to the Qwen project, wrote that he was “heartbroken” to hear the news. In a post on

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

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