Something is afoot in the land of Qwen
I’m behind on writing about Qwen 3.5, a truly remarkable family of open weight models released by Alibaba’s Qwen team over the past few weeks. I’m hoping that the 3.5 family doesn’t turn out to be Qwen’s swan song, seeing as that team has had some very high profile departures in the past 24 hours.
It all started with this tweet from Junyang Lin (@JustinLin610):
me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen.
Junyang Lin was the lead researcher building Qwen, and was key to releasing their open weight models from 2024 onwards.
As far as I can tell a trigger for this resignation was a re-org within Alibaba where a new researcher hired from Google’s Gemini team was put in charge of Qwen, but I’ve not confirmed that detail.
More information is available in this article from 36kr.com. Here’s Wikipedia on 36Kr confirming that it’s a credible media source established in 2010 with a good track record reporting on the Chinese technology industry.
The article is in Chinese—here are some quotes translated via Google Translate:
At approximately 1:00 PM Beijing time on March 4th, Tongyi Lab held an emergency All Hands meeting, where Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming frankly told Qianwen employees. Twelve hours ago (at 0:11 AM Beijing time on March 4th), Lin Junyang, the technical lead for Alibaba’s Qwen Big Data Model, suddenly announced his resignation on X. Lin Junyang was a key figure in promoting Alibaba’s open-source AI models and one of Alibaba’s youngest P10 employees. Amidst the industry uproar, many members of Qwen were also unable to accept the sudden departure of their team’s key figure. “Given far fewer resources than competitors, Junyang’s leadership is one of the core factors in achieving today’s results,” multiple Qianwen members told 36Kr. [...] Regarding Lin Junyang’s whereabouts, no new conclusions were reached at the meeting. However, around 2 PM, Lin Junyang posted again on his WeChat Moments, stating, “Brothers of Qwen, continue as originally planned, no problem,” without explicitly confirming whether he would return. [...]
That piece also lists several other key members who have apparently resigned:
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