Alibaba\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
Junyang Lin, a central technical leader on Alibaba\u2019s Qwen team, said<\/a> in a post on X on Tuesday that he was \u201cstepping down\u201d from the project, without elaborating. He joined Alibaba in July 2019 and became part of the Qwen team in April 2023, according<\/a> to his LinkedIn profile.<\/p>\n The abrupt departure, which drew strong reactions from colleagues and industry partners, comes as global competition among AI developers intensifies and companies race to build models rivaling those from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. <\/p>\n Alibaba\u2019s Qwen family of models has emerged as one of China\u2019s most prominent open-weight AI efforts, with recent releases posting benchmark results that often rival systems from leading U.S. developers. The Chinese tech giant introduced the model in April 2023 and opened it to public use that September after receiving regulatory clearance.<\/p>\n Alibaba introduced<\/a> its Qwen 3.5 Small Model series on Monday, with four models spanning 0.8B, 2B, 4B, and 9B parameters. The systems, the company said, are native multimodal models designed for uses ranging from on-device AI deployment to lightweight agents. The launch drew attention from figures in the AI community, including Elon Musk, who wrote<\/a> on X that the models showed \u201cimpressive intelligence density.\u201d<\/p>\n Lin\u2019s departure came just as the Qwen team was pushing ahead with new releases, prompting unusually strong reactions from colleagues and partners who described his role in the project as central.<\/p>\n Wenting Zhao, a research scientist on the Qwen team, described<\/a> Lin\u2019s departure as \u201cthe end of an era,\u201d thanking him in a post on X for helping drive the project\u2019s advances in open source AI and engineering. Yuchen Jin, chief technology officer of AI infrastructure startup Hyperbolic, said<\/a> Lin helped connect Qwen with the global developer community, recalling late-night collaboration with the team during model launches. Tiezhen Wang, head of APAC ecosystem at Hugging Face, also described<\/a> Lin\u2019s departure as \u201can immense loss\u201d for the Qwen project.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA The circumstances surrounding Lin\u2019s departure remain unclear. Lin did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Chen Cheng, a contributor to the Qwen project, wrote<\/a> that he was \u201cheartbroken\u201d by the news. In his post on X, Cheng appeared to be addressing Lin directly, writing, \u201cI know leaving wasn\u2019t your choice\u201d and said the team had been working together on model launches only hours earlier.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n