Junyang Lin, who joined Alibaba in July 2019 and took charge of the Qwen AI project in April 2023, stepped down as technical lead just one day after the rollout of Qwen 3.5 open-weight small models. His exit marks a significant shakeup in Alibaba’s AI division as the company intensifies its model development.

Colleagues and partners described Lin’s departure as “the end of an era,” thanking him for advancing open-source AI initiatives. The chief technology officer of Hyperbolic credited Lin with connecting Qwen to the global developer community, while high-profile observers highlighted Qwen’s benchmark results rivaling leading U.S. systems.

Despite the leadership change, Alibaba continues to broaden its AI ecosystem. During the Lunar New Year period, the Qwen app processed nearly 200 million one-sentence orders, and the cloud division introduced a low-cost AI coding platform featuring multiple Chinese AI models under a single subscription. Meanwhile, Alibaba’s T-Head unit released the Zhenwu 810E AI processor, claiming performance comparable to NVIDIA’s H20 chip for domestic training and inference workloads.