Lin Junyang Announces Departure from Alibaba Qianwen

On the early morning of March 4th, Lin Junyang, the core leader of Qwen, posted on X: “me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen.” (I am stepping down. Goodbye, my beloved Qwen.)

Previously, on the evening of March 2nd, Alibaba Qwen officially open-sourced four small-sized Qwen 3.5 model series, namely Qwen 3.5-0.8B/2B/4B/9B. After the release of the small models, they gained attention from Elon Musk on overseas social media. Lin Junyang thanked Musk for the likes on X.

According to the same news, Alibaba Group has unified the general term and core brand of AI (artificial intelligence) as Qwen internally.

Born in 1993, Lin Junyang is Alibaba’s youngest P10-level technical leader. He studied computer science at Peking University for his undergraduate degree and completed his master’s at the School of Foreign Languages at Peking University, majoring in linguistics and applied linguistics.

After graduating in 2019, Lin Junyang directly joined Alibaba DAMO Academy, officially beginning his career as a senior algorithm engineer.

At the end of 2022, Alibaba integrated DAMO Academy’s AI teams for language, vision, and other areas into Alibaba Cloud, establishing Tongyi Laboratory. Lin Junyang was officially appointed as the technical lead for the Tongyi Qianwen series large models.

At the AGI-Next Frontier Summit in January this year, Lin Junyang mentioned the relationship between foundational models and agents, stating, “Models are products. Today, developing foundational models is essentially creating products. Researchers also need to act like product managers, turning research成果 into systems that are usable in the real world.”