I just noticed an interesting story in the Chinese artificial intelligence world. Lin Junyan, the engineer who led the Qwen team at Alibaba, announced his resignation very suddenly on the X platform with a simple sentence: "I resign, farewell to Qwen, my beloved."

What’s intriguing is that this happened just one day after a major strategic meeting held by Alibaba with Ant Group in Hangzhou, where they focused on "full immersion in AI." But the next morning, the bomb exploded.

According to multiple sources, the departure was not voluntary. One of the key contributors to Qwen clearly stated: "I am truly heartbroken, I know your departure was not your choice." This indicates a model of forced resignation, not a personal decision.

The real disagreement seems to be fundamentally technical and commercial. Lin Junyan believed that the power of developing large models comes from deep collaboration across all teams. But Alibaba’s management wanted to dismantle the unified team and split it into separate horizontal units. Additionally, there was a fundamental disagreement over whether open-source is the right path, or if Alibaba should focus on commercial profitability rather than building a global technical standard.

The value of what Lin Junyan achieved is priceless. Under his leadership, Qwen reached the top spot worldwide among open-source large models. By January 2026, models derived from Qwen on the Hugging Face platform exceeded 200,000 models, with over a billion downloads. That’s a real achievement.

What’s worrying is that this is not the only case. Hours after Lin Junyan’s departure, the subsequent training officer and a key contributor to Qwen 3.5 also resigned. It seems there is a wave of resignations within the core team.

For Alibaba, this is a major strategic shift. They are moving from building a global technical standard to focusing on commercial transformation. But the question is: can they maintain development momentum without the core team that built all of this?

In the world of AI, talent is everything. Losing a technical leader of this caliber could significantly impact research and development pace. Worse, it may open the door for more departures of key talents. Competitors like ByteDance and Tencent will be watching these developments closely.