Alibaba’s Qwen AI project has lost one of its most prominent technical leaders just a day after the company unveiled its latest Qwen 3.5 open-weight small models.
Junyang Lin, a key technical leader on the Qwen team, announced on X on Tuesday that he was “stepping down” from the project, without providing further details. According to his LinkedIn profile, Lin joined Alibaba in July 2019 and became part of the Qwen team in April 2023.
The sudden departure triggered strong reactions from colleagues and industry partners, coming at a time when global competition among AI developers is intensifying as companies race to build models capable of rivaling those from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
Alibaba’s Qwen family of models has become one of China’s most prominent open-weight AI initiatives, with recent releases often achieving benchmark results comparable to leading systems from U.S. developers. The company first introduced the Qwen model in April 2023 and made it publicly available in September that year after receiving regulatory approval.
On Monday, Alibaba launched the Qwen 3.5 Small Model series, which includes four models with 0.8B, 2B, 4B and 9B parameters. The company said the models are native multimodal systems designed for a range of applications, from on-device AI deployment to lightweight AI agents.
The release also attracted attention from figures in the global AI community. Elon Musk commented on X that the models demonstrated “impressive intelligence density.”
Lin’s departure came just as the Qwen team was pushing ahead with new releases, prompting unusually strong responses from colleagues who described his role in the project as central.
Wenting Zhao, a research scientist on the Qwen team, called the exit “the end of an era” in a post on X, thanking Lin for helping drive the project’s progress in open-source AI and engineering. Meanwhile, Yuchen Jin, chief technology officer of AI infrastructure startup Hyperbolic, credited Lin with helping connect Qwen to the global developer community and recalled late-night collaboration with the team during model launches.
Tiezhen Wang, head of APAC ecosystem at Hugging Face, also described Lin’s departure as “an immense loss” for the project.
