I just came across interesting news about a top executive from Alibaba’s Qwen team resigning voluntarily.

According to reports, Lin Junyang, who is in charge of Qwen’s technical side, officially submitted his resignation. On the morning of the 4th, he posted on X saying, “me stepping down bye my beloved qwen.” Another team member, Kaixin Li, also announced his resignation on the same day.

What’s notable is that Tang Jie, the CEO of Zhipu AI, immediately responded by inviting Lin Junyang and Kaixin Li to join him—showing open competition within the AI industry on the same day. On that same day as well, Yu Hengxuan, head of training after the Qwen model, announced his resignation. Zhou Hao, a researcher from DeepMind, took over in his place. Hui Binyuan, head of Qwen Code, has been moved to Meta since January this year.

Lin Junyang’s reason for writing his resignation letter voluntarily is related to organizational restructuring at Tongyi Lab. Tongyi Lab plans to separate Qwen from its original vertical structure and divide it into horizontal teams, such as pre-training, post-training, and data processing. This reduces the scope of his management role and conflicts with his technical viewpoint that different teams should work in close connection with each other.

Some executives at Alibaba are dissatisfied with Qwen-3.5, which was released on Chinese New Year’s Eve. They call it a half-finished product.

As for Lin Junyang, he was born in 1993, completed his master’s degree at Peking University in 2019, and joined Alibaba DAMO Academy in 2025. He received the P10 position, the youngest at Alibaba, demonstrating his potential. A resignation from someone at this level is therefore a significant loss for the team.