Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s tech lead for its Qwen open-source model is standing down, a surprise move that is rattling the global developer community and casting a shadow over the tech giant’s pivot into AI.
Junyang Lin, who also goes by Justin, announced the unexpected development early Wednesday in a post that quickly drew a surge of support from the open-source community. “me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen,” he wrote on X, without elaborating.
Lin didn’t respond to messages seeking comment. An Alibaba spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lin is one of the most influential figures in Alibaba’s transition into AI, as the Chinese e-commerce giant seeks its next growth engine beyond online shopping and cloud computing. The Qwen series of large language models are among the top-performing offerings globally, and serve as the technical foundation for a suite of consumer apps, including Alibaba’s newly revamped chatbot.
He also set up a team working on robotics and embodied AI within Qwen last year.
Before his announcement, Lin had been working on building generalist models at Alibaba since 2022. He served as tech lead for the Qwen large language and multimodal model series and oversaw its open-source initiatives, according to his LinkedIn profile. He holds a master’s degree from Peking University.
In one of his last public appearances as Qwen head, Lin told a forum in Beijing in January that Chinese companies are unlikely to leapfrog the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic PBC with fundamental breakthroughs in AI over the next three to five years.
“A massive amount of OpenAI’s compute is dedicated to next-generation research, whereas we are stretched thin — just meeting delivery demands consumes most of our resources,” Lin said at the time.
