Alibaba’s Qwen AI Lead Steps Down After Major Model Release

Junyang Lin, a central technical leader on Alibaba’s Qwen AI project, announced his departure just after the company unveiled the Qwen 3.5 Small Model series. The launch introduced four multimodal models ranging from 0.8B to 9B parameters and drew praise from industry figures. Colleagues and partners described Lin’s exit as a significant loss for the open‑weight AI effort. Alibaba has not commented on the reasons for the move or on future leadership of the Qwen team. Read more