Alibaba committed to AI advancement amid leadership shake up

Alibaba Cloud's chief technology officer, Zhou Jingren, will take a leading role in advancing the development of Alibaba's signature Qwen large language model, following the departure of a key technical leader as the group reshuffles responsibilities around its foundational AI strategy.

In an internal email to employees on Thursday, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu responded on to the resignation of Lin Junyang, a core leader of the company's Qwen large language model.

According to the email, Zhou will continue to lead the Tongyi Lab in advancing subsequent work. Meanwhile, the group will establish a foundation model support group, jointly coordinated by Wu, Zhou, and Fan Yu, to mobilize group-wide resources in support of large model development.

Wu stressed that building foundational large models is a key long-term strategy for the company and Alibaba will continue to adhere to its open-source model strategy, while further increasing investment in artificial intelligence research and development, and stepping up efforts to attract top talent.

Alibaba's response came after Lin announced his departure on social media on Wednesday, writing: "me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen". Shortly afterward, Yu Bowen, head of post-training for the Qwen model, also announced his departure from the company.

Born in 1993, Lin was one of Alibaba's youngest P10-level technical leaders. He led the development of the Qwen3-Max model — which features more than 1 trillion parameters — and later guided the release of the Qwen3.5 series of smaller models.

According to an Alibaba insider, Lin's departure stemmed from adjustments to his responsibilities as the Qwen model evolved from a foundational model project into a group-level strategic initiative.

As the group plans to recruit more leading AI researchers to strengthen the talent pool of its base model team, the restructuring of roles ultimately led to Lin's resignation, the insider said.