Several Key Researchers Depart Alibaba's Qwen AI Unit

Multiple core members of Alibaba Group Holding's Qwen AI team have left their roles, according to announcements made by the individuals on Tuesday, a day after the e-commerce giant released its latest family of small AI models.

Junyang Lin, a technical lead for the Qwen project, announced his departure on social media platform X, stating: "me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen." Lin, who joined Alibaba in 2019, had been a prominent figure in the development of the company's open-source large language models.

Additional departures announced publicly include Binyuan Hui, a staff research scientist involved in code-generation efforts; Kaixin Li, a contributor to the Qwen 3.5, VL, and Coder models; and Yu Bowen, who was responsible for post-training initiatives. None of the departing researchers provided specific reasons for their exits.

The personnel changes follow the March 2 launch of Alibaba's Qwen 3.5 compact open-weight models, a series that received positive industry feedback.

Reactions within the AI research community highlighted the significance of the departures. A researcher affiliated with the Qwen team described Lin's exit as "the end of an era" on social media. Representatives from Hugging Face, an AI platform that collaborates with open-source projects, also noted the potential impact on the project's momentum.

Unconfirmed speculation on online forums suggested possible internal restructuring at Alibaba Cloud, the division overseeing Qwen, or shifts in leadership following the recent model releases. Some unverified reports mentioned the potential addition of personnel with backgrounds from Google's Gemini team.

Alibaba had not issued an official statement regarding the leadership structure of the Qwen team or the departures as of Tuesday. The company recently consolidated its AI offerings under the Qwen brand and continues to release updates, including models with agentic and multimodal capabilities.

The departures raise questions about the continuity of one of China's prominent open-source AI initiatives amid intensifying competition in the sector, both domestically and internationally. The company's future roadmap for Qwen and its open-source strategy remain to be clarified.