Alibaba's Qwen tech lead steps down after major AI push | TechCrunch

Alibaba’s 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. Junyang Lin, a central technical leader on Alibaba’s Qwen team, said in a post on X on Tuesday that he was “stepping down” from the project, without elaborating. He joined Alibaba in July 2019 and became part of the Qwen team in April 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. 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. Alibaba’s Qwen family of models has emerged as one of China’s 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. Alibaba introduced 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 on X that the models showed “impressive intelligence density.” Lin’s departure came just as the Qwen team was pushing ahead w...