I just saw a rather substantive news story from China's AI industry. Several people from Alibaba's Qwen chose to resign at the same time, which doesn't seem to be a coincidence.

According to reports, Lin Junyang, the technical lead of the Qwen team, officially submitted his resignation on March 3rd. He also posted on X saying, "me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen" the next morning. Soon after, the CEO of Zhipu AI, Tang Jie, responded immediately, seemingly trying to persuade Lin Junyang and another Qwen team member, Kaixin Li, to join their team. Interestingly, on the same day, others from the Qwen team also resigned, such as Yu Henghui, who was responsible for training after the Qwen model was released, and Hui Pingyuan, head of Qwen Code, who transferred to Meta in January.

In fact, these resignations are related to major restructuring happening within Alibaba's Tongyi Labs. They plan to spin off Qwen from the traditional vertical structure and create a horizontal team based on different functions such as pre-training, post-training, text processing, and multimodal, which reduces Lin Junyang's scope of management.

What caused conflict is that Lin Junyang believes that teams should be more closely connected, but this restructuring moves in the opposite direction. There are also reports that some Alibaba employees are dissatisfied with Qwen-3.5, launched on Chinese New Year’s Eve, calling it a "semi-finished product," which may be one of the reasons for the tension.

Interestingly, Lin Junyang is a significant figure at Alibaba. Born in 1993, he earned his master's degree from Peking University in 2019 and has been with Alibaba DAMO Academy since then. In 2025, he was promoted to P10, the highest position at Alibaba, and he is the youngest person to hold this title. Now, he has chosen to resign from the company.

This event reflects the challenges large tech companies face in managing highly capable AI teams. When restructuring and changes occur, top personnel often resign to seek new opportunities with more challenge and independence.