Alibaba internal email responds to Lin Junyang's departure

On the morning of March 5, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu Yongming responded internally to Lin Junyang’s resignation. He said that he will continue to adhere to the open-source model strategy and steadily increase investment in AI R&D as well as efforts to attract outstanding talent.

The full text of the email is as follows—

To all Tongyi Lab colleagues:

The company has decided to approve Lin Junyang’s resignation and thanks Lin Junyang for his past contributions in his role. Jingren will continue to lead Tongyi Lab in advancing the subsequent work. At the same time, the company will establish a foundation model support team, coordinated jointly by me, Jingren, and Fanyu to support the development of the foundation models using group resources.

If technical progress doesn’t move forward, it goes backward. Developing large foundation models is our key strategy for the future. While continuing to adhere to the open-source model strategy, we will steadily increase our R&D investment in the field of artificial intelligence and step up efforts to attract outstanding talent. Let’s work together—keep it up.

Wu Yongming

March 5, 2026

Previously, on March 4, Lin Junyang, a senior Alibaba advanced algorithm expert and the head of the Tongyi Qianwen large model team, posted on a social platform that he would leave the Qianwen team. According to reports, Lin Junyang is the person steering the Alibaba Qianwen large model.

Judging from his career background, Lin Junyang is the youngest P10 in Alibaba’s history. He joined Alibaba in 2019 and has been there for nearly 7 years. Before stepping down, he served as the head of the Alibaba Qianwen large model team and a core member of Alibaba Group’s Tongyi Lab.

Lin Junyang was born in 1993. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science and his master’s degree in linguistics from Peking University. After graduating from his master’s program, in 2019 Lin Junyang joined Alibaba’s DAMO Academy Intelligent Computing Laboratory and became an algorithm expert in the Intelligent Computing Laboratory, participating in the development of Alibaba’s M6 multimodal pre-training model.

In 2022, multiple research teams at Alibaba’s DAMO Academy reorganized on Alibaba Cloud to establish Tongyi Lab. Lin Junyang moved from DAMO Academy to Tongyi Lab and was officially appointed as the technical lead for the Qianwen series of large models.

The Qianwen large models have gradually grown into one of the world’s strongest open-source models in the AI large-model race. On April 29, 2025, Alibaba released the Qwen3 series models as open source. In multiple authoritative benchmark evaluations, they comprehensively surpassed the top global open-source models from the same period and officially topped the list of the world’s strongest open-source models. In January 2026, the latest data from the world’s largest AI open-source community, Hugging Face, showed that the number of derivative Alibaba Qianwen models exceeded 200,000, and the download volume of the Qianwen series models exceeded 1 billion times, firmly ranking first globally among open-source large models.