Alibaba's AI Unit Scrambles After Chief's Exit
Alibaba’s flagship AI unit is in crisis mode after the abrupt departure of its Qwen tech lead. The company has reportedly formed an emergency task force to stabilize the division, illustrating the extreme volatility and talent pressures within the competitive AI landscape.
The sudden exit of Qwen's technical lead, Lin Junyang, was the third high-profile departure from the AI unit this year. He followed Yu Bowen, who led post-training for the models, and Hui Binyuan, a staff research scientist focused on coding. This pattern of departures points to significant internal pressures and the intense global competition for top-tier AI talent. Lin, born in 1993, was one of Alibaba's youngest P10-level technical leaders and was considered a core architect of the Qwen models. His departure, announced personally on the social media platform X, sent shockwaves through the AI community just two days after Qwen had released a new series of small models that even drew praise from Elon Musk. In response, Alibaba's Group CEO Eddie Wu is personally leading a new emergency task force. This move centralizes control over the project, with the task force including Alibaba Group's CTO Wu Zeming and Alibaba Cloud's CTO Zhou Jingren, demonstrating a direct, top-down intervention to stabilize the division. At an emergency all-hands meeting following the announcement, senior leadership promised the remaining team more computing power and an expanded research team. CEO Eddie Wu also sent a letter to the AI lab affirming the company's commitment to its open-source strategy and increased investment in R&D and talent recruitment. The turmoil comes despite significant user growth for the Qwen mobile app, which reportedly surged from 31 million to 203 million monthly active users in February. This rapid expansion followed aggressive user acquisition campaigns during the Lunar New Year holidays, placing it as a major global competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Possible internal friction may have contributed to the departures, with reports suggesting a planned reorganization would have split the vertically integrated Qwen team into horizontal divisions, reducing the management scope of leaders like Lin. There were also differing views on whether the unit's focus on open-source models was hindering direct revenue generation.
