Did the core team of the Qianwen model collectively resign? Alibaba denies the rumor

On March 5, in response to recently circulating online rumors about Alibaba “Qianwen model core team collectively resigning” and “open-source strategy adjustments,” among other untrue claims, the Alibaba Group issued a rumor rebuttal to reporters from Nandu N Video. It stated, “At present, the Qianwen model team is stable, and there has been no situation of ‘collective resignation.’ All products and services are running normally; Qianwen will continue to adhere to the open-source strategy. The basic model team has never been assigned commercial KPIs such as DAU (daily active users). The goal of the Qwen (Qianwen) large model is to continuously pursue the upper limit of model intelligence and achieve AGI. Alibaba sincerely welcomes top AI talent from around the world to join and jointly build world-class large-model technology and an open-source ecosystem. Alibaba will continue to increase investment to provide solid support for the Qianwen team, and will scale new technical heights.”

Earlier, an internal Alibaba source told reporters from Nandu N Video that, “The company has not changed Qianwen’s open-source strategy, and it has not used commercial targets such as daily active users to evaluate the basic model team. Lin Junyang’s resignation has nothing to do with these rumors. The actual situation is that as Qianwen progresses from basic model development to the group’s overall strategy, the company believes it needs to recruit more technical top talent to enhance the talent density of the basic model team. In this process, there were adjustments to Lin Junyang’s scope of responsibilities, and because Lin Junyang did not accept this, he submitted his resignation.”

In the early hours of March 4, Lin Junyang, the Qwen technical lead at Alibaba, posted a message on a social media platform to bid farewell to Qianwen. As one of the core drivers behind Alibaba’s AI open-source models, and also one of Alibaba’s youngest P10s, Lin Junyang’s sudden departure “sparked a thousand waves with a single stone.” After that, Binyuan Hui, a scientist at Alibaba Tongyi Laboratory, reposted the post and said that he, too, had exited Qianwen. It was also disclosed that the head of post-training at Qianwen, Yu Bowen, announced his resignation on the same day.

On the morning of March 5, Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming formally responded to Lin Junyang’s resignation in an internal email. He said the company had decided to approve Lin Junyang’s resignation and thanked Lin Junyang for his contributions in his position. Zhou Jingren, Alibaba Cloud CTO, will continue to lead Tongyi Laboratory in advancing subsequent work.

After Lin Junyang and others bid farewell to Qianwen on social media, their next moves drew significant attention across the industry. Previously, on the afternoon of March 4, Lin Junyang posted on his Moments stating that he needed to rest, and mentioned, “Qwen’s brothers, continue working according to the original arrangements—no problem.”