Alibaba Qwen technical lead Junyang Lin steps down

Junyang Lin, a technical leader on Alibaba’s Qwen team, announced on Tuesday that he is stepping down from the project. The announcement comes just one day after the company, based in China, introduced its Qwen 3.5 series of open-weight models—AI models with publicly available weights—on Monday. Lin, who joined Alibaba in July 2019 and transitioned to the Qwen team in April 2023, did not elaborate on the reasons for his departure. The move comes amid intensifying global competition as developers in China and the U.S. race to build rival AI models.

The departure coincided with the launch of the Qwen 3.5 Small Model series. The release includes four distinct model sizes:

• 0.8B parameters
• 2B parameters
• 4B parameters
• 9B parameters

These systems are native multimodal models—AI systems capable of processing multiple types of data—designed for applications ranging from on-device AI deployment directly on hardware to lightweight agents, which are small-scale AI software agents. The release drew praise from figures in the AI community, including Elon Musk, who noted that the models demonstrated impressive intelligence density.

Lin’s exit triggered significant reactions from colleagues and industry partners. Wenting Zhao, a research scientist on the Qwen team, called the departure the end of an era, while Tiezhen Wang, head of the APAC ecosystem at AI platform Hugging Face, described it as an immense loss for the project. Yuchen Jin, chief technology officer of AI infrastructure startup Hyperbolic, highlighted Lin’s work in connecting Qwen with the global developer community. Meanwhile, Chen Cheng, a contributor to the Qwen project, stated he was heartbroken by the news. Addressing Lin, Cheng wrote, “I know leaving wasn’t your choice,” suggesting the departure may not have been voluntary. Additionally, Binyuan Hui, another member of the Qwen team, updated his profile to list himself as formerly MTS @Alibaba_Qwen, though it is not immediately clear whether he has left the company.

Why it matters

The departure of a central technical leader from Alibaba’s Qwen team occurs as the company intensifies its competition with major U.S. AI developers and continues to expand its open-weight model offerings.