Troubles in Qwen-land
Qwen's technical lead and several core team members have resigned from Alibaba following an internal reorganization, putting the future of the world's most prolific open-source model family in question
According to Chinese news media 36Kr, several core technical leads responsible for Alibaba's Qwen resigned from the company.
Lin Junyang, Qwen's technical lead since 2022, resigned on March 3. Several core members followed: Bowen Yu, who led post-training research and the Qwen-Instruct line; and Kaixin Li, a core contributor to Qwen 3.5, Qwen-VL, and Qwen-Coder. A number of younger researchers also resigned on the same day.
This happened two days after Qwen released four new small-size open-source models on X, which was widely praised.
The source of the unhappiness appears to be a result of an internal reorganization. The Chinese news site has more details, including that it's unclear if Alibaba has accepted their resignation.
This follows the departure of Hui Binyuan, a staff research scientist focused on coding and the lead behind the Qwen-Coder series, in January.
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