I just noticed a news story shaking up the AI industry. Jonyang Lin, the head of the Qwen team at Alibaba, announced his resignation very unexpectedly on X saying "me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen." The truth is, this departure was not a simple personal choice, but reflects deep conflicts within the group over the development path of large models.

What happened in detail: On March 3, after a strategic meeting attended by Alibaba’s senior leadership, Jonyang Lin left the meeting immediately due to fundamental disagreements, and resigned on the same day. The next morning, he posted his famous message on X, which received over 10,000 likes. Interestingly, on the same day, Yu Wenbo and Li Kaishen, two of the key contributors to the Qwen team, also resigned. A comment from Chen Qing, one of the founding partners, confirmed that the departure was not a choice: "I am truly heartbroken, I know your departure was not your choice."

The real disagreement lies in a completely different vision. Jonyang Lin believes that the power of developing large models comes from deep collaboration among all teams, and that dividing work across separate production lines will weaken innovation. But Alibaba plans a radical restructuring: dismantling the unified team led by Jonyang Lin and distributing tasks to independent horizontal units. This means reducing his authority and changing the model from "single core" to "multiple parallel forces."

There is also another contradiction: Alibaba has started focusing on commercial goals rather than building a global technical standard. Qwen reached the top of open-source models worldwide under Lin’s leadership — 200,000 derivative models on Hugging Face, over a billion downloads, and ranked third globally according to Stanford’s index. But Lin believes that a comprehensive open-source strategy is the right path, while some senior managers at Alibaba see it as a "product lacking" that has not achieved the expected revenue.

The key point: Jonyang Lin is not just an ordinary employee. He is one of the rare local talents in China — born in 1993, with a bachelor’s from Peking University and a master’s in linguistics, and became the youngest P10-level expert at Alibaba at age 32. He is classified among the "Big Four" in the field of Chinese large models alongside other leaders from global universities. His departure represents a significant loss for Alibaba.

Now the big questions arise: who will replace Jonyang Lin? Alibaba says there is no full replacement at the moment, and responsibilities will be distributed among multiple teams. Where will Lin go? Likely he will start his own project or join a star team in the model field. Some Alibaba leaders are still trying to persuade him to stay, but the opportunity seems very slim.

The deeper problem: this exit could trigger a wave of other resignations from the core Qwen team. In just three months, the chief technology officer, the subsequent training manager, and the code manager have all resigned. This will directly impact the pace of future model development. Alibaba now faces a real challenge: organizational disruption, talent flight, and fierce competition from ByteDance and Tencent. The new strategy focuses on commercial transformation, but the question remains: will they be able to maintain technical momentum and innovation? That’s what the coming weeks and months will test.