Alibaba’s Qwen AI division head resigns shortly after new product launch

The head of Alibaba Group's Qwen artificial intelligence model division, ‌Lin Junyang, said on Wednesday that he would be stepping down from his role—a move that comes two days after the company released updated products.

"Bye, my beloved Qwen," Lin wrote in a post on X, without providing further explanation.

Lin and Alibaba did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Qwen's mobile application had 203 million monthly ‌active users in February, surging from 31.05 million in January. 

It now ranks third globally behind OpenAI's ChatGPT and ByteDance's Doubao app, according to AICPB.com, which tracks AI products.

The jump came after Chinese tech giants launched aggressive campaigns to draw more users to their apps during the Lunar New Year holidays.

Alibaba's Qwen team of AI researchers has been among the most prolific and well-regarded by the international machine learning community—shipping dozens of powerful generalized and specialized generative models starting last summer, most of them entirely open source and free.

The departure of Junyang "Justin" Lin, the technical lead who steered Qwen from a nascent lab project to a global powerhouse with over 600 million downloads, alongside two fellow colleagues — staff research scientist Binyuan Hui and intern Kaixin Li — marks a volatile inflection point for Alibaba Cloud and its role as an international open source AI leader.

These three Qwen team members announced their departures on X today, though they did not share the reasons or whether or not they were voluntary.