I heard that Alibaba’s Qwen team has been going through major changes over the past few weeks, and many members of the core team have submitted their resignations on their own.

It began with Lin Junyang, who is in charge of the technical side of the Qwen team. He formally submitted his resignation on the afternoon of March 3, and then posted on X the next morning: “me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen.” Not long after that, Tang Jie, the CEO of Zhipu AI, replied on X and invited him to an event, seemingly indicating that Zhipu AI is looking for talented people from the Qwen team.

On the same day, Kaixin Li, a member of the Qwen team, also announced his resignation. Tang Jie replied by inviting him as well: “join us, more focus,” which clearly showed his intent.

It’s not just that. Yu Hengwen, the head of training after the Qwen model, also resigned on the same day. His role will be taken over by Zhou Hao, a senior researcher from DeepMind who joined Tongyi Lab at the beginning of the year. Previously, Hui Pinyuan, head of Qwen Code, also resigned and moved to Meta in January.

From what I’ve heard, Lin Junyang’s resignation is related to the restructuring of Tongyi Lab. There are plans to split Qwen away from the vertically integrated structure into a flat, team-based arrangement—such as pre-training, post-training, text processing, and multimodal—which would reduce Lin Junyang’s scope of management. However, this separation direction goes against his technical viewpoint.

Some management personnel at Alibaba were also dissatisfied with the launch of Qwen-3.5 on Chinese New Year’s Eve, calling it a “semi-finished product,” which may be a sign that expectations are only getting higher.

What’s interesting is that Lin Junyang was born in 1993, earned his master’s degree from Peking University in 2019, and entered the Alibaba DAMO Academy in 2025. He obtained the P10 position—the highest rank at Alibaba—at the youngest age. It seems that his decision to resign voluntarily is more about differences in technical vision than other issues.