A key technical figure behind one of China’s leading AI model families has stepped away at a pivotal moment. Alibaba’s Qwen AI initiative saw Junyang Lin announce on X on Tuesday that he was “stepping down” from the project, without sharing further details. Lin joined Alibaba in 07/2019 and became part of the Qwen team in 04/2023, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The unexpected move came just 1 day after Alibaba unveiled its new Qwen 3.5 open-weight small models. The Qwen family, first introduced in 04/2023 and opened to public use in 09/2023 after regulatory approval, has become one of China’s most visible open-weight AI efforts. Its recent benchmark results have often rivaled systems from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. On Monday, Alibaba launched the Qwen 3.5 Small Model series, featuring 4 variants with 0.8B, 2B, 4B and 9B parameters. The company said these native multimodal systems are built for on-device AI deployment and lightweight agent use cases. Elon Musk reacted on X, calling the models “impressive intelligence density.”
Lin’s departure triggered strong reactions from colleagues and industry partners. Wenting Zhao, a research scientist on the Qwen team, described the moment as “the end of an era,” crediting Lin for advancing open source AI and engineering efforts. Yuchen Jin, chief technology officer of Hyperbolic, said Lin played a key role in connecting Qwen with the global developer community, recalling late-night collaboration during model launches. Tiezhen Wang, head of APAC ecosystem at Hugging Face, called the move “an immense loss” for the project.
The circumstances behind the leadership change remain unclear. Lin did not respond to a request for comment. Chen Cheng, a contributor to Qwen, wrote he was “heartbroken,” adding, “I know leaving wasn’t your choice,” and noted the team had been working together on launches only hours earlier. Binyuan Hui, another team member, updated his X profile to read “formerly MTS @Alibaba_Qwen,” though it is not clear if he has exited or when the change occurred. Alibaba has not commented on the reasons for the departures or on the future leadership structure of the Qwen AI team.
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