Alibaba-W responds to Lin Junyang's resignation: decision has been made to approve, and a foundational model support team will be established.

On March 5, Alibaba-W(09988) CEO Wu Yongming responded in an internal email to Lin Junyang’s resignation. Wu Yongming said, “The company has decided to approve Lin Junyang’s resignation, and thanks Lin Junyang for the efforts he made in his role. Jingren will continue to lead the Tongyi Laboratory to advance the subsequent work. At the same time, the company will set up a foundation model support group, coordinated jointly by me, Jingren, and Fan Yu to support the group’s foundation model development resources.” He also mentioned that while continuing to adhere to an open-source model strategy, the company will continuously increase R&D investment in the field of artificial intelligence and step up efforts to attract outstanding talent.

In the early hours of March 4, Lin Junyang posted on social media to announce his resignation, quickly drawing market attention. And within 36 hours before announcing his departure, Lin Junyang also led the open-sourcing of four Qwen3.5 small-sized model series. Previously, Lin Junyang was the youngest P10-level technical负责人 within the Alibaba Group. In 2024, Lin Junyang led the open-source work for the Qwen series models, covering different parameter scale versions such as 7B, 14B, and 72B.

Media reports say that Lin Junyang’s final choice to leave likely relates to organizational adjustments the Qwen team is currently undergoing. The Qwen team directly managed by Lin Junyang is part of Tongyi Laboratory, which is led by Zhou Jingren, Alibaba Cloud’s CTO. Recently, Tongyi Laboratory plans to split the Qwen team—from a “vertically integrated” system that covers different training processes and modalities—into separate horizontal division teams such as pre-training, post-training, text, and multimodal, and these teams will still be affiliated with Tongyi Laboratory. Lin Junyang’s scope of management will be narrowed.

Mirae Securities (Mort) released a research report stating that the loss of such a key talent has already raised major concerns in the industry about the future development path and continuity of Qwen. The firm views this as an execution risk premium for the argument that “Qwen is a long-term brand/franchise,” rather than an immediate breakdown of the investment thesis. It increases the probability weight of short-term disruptions to shipment pacing and organizational output capability, because the timing of this round of resignations is unusually tightly clustered.

It is worth noting that recently, personnel changes have occurred frequently within the Qwen technical team. Several team members have announced resignations one after another, including Yu Bowen, Qwen post-training负责人, Li Kaixin, a core contributor for Qwen3.5/VL/Coder, and Hui Binyuan,负责人 for Qwen Code.