Alibaba’s tech leader Qwen is stepping down after a big AI push

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

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

The sudden departure, which sparked strong reactions from colleagues and industry partners, comes as global competition among AI developers intensifies and companies race to build models that rival those from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

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

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

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

Wenting Zhao, a research scientist on Cowen’s team, called Lin’s departure “the end of an era,” and thanked him in a post on X for helping drive the project’s progress in AI and open source engineering. Yuchen Jin, chief technology officer at AI infrastructure startup Hyperbolic, said Lin helped connect Qwen with the global developer community, noting late-night collaborations with the team during prototype launches. Tizhen Wang, head of the Asia-Pacific ecosystem at Hugging Face, also called Lin’s departure 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 Qing, a Coin Project contributor, wrote that he was “deeply saddened” by the news. In his post on

Binyuan Hui, another member of Team Qwen, updated his profile on X to describe himself as “formerly MTS @Alibaba_Qwen.” However, it is not immediately clear if he left the company or when the change took place.

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