BEIJING, March 4, 2026, 20:00 (GMT+8)
- Lin Junyang announced he’s leaving his post as head of Alibaba’s Qwen AI model division.
- This marks the Qwen team’s third senior exit so far this year.
- Alibaba stock dropped roughly 4% in Hong Kong trading.
Lin Junyang, who led Alibaba Group Holding Limited’s (9988.HK) Qwen AI model division, announced on Wednesday he’s leaving his post—the third major exit from the team this year. Shares of Alibaba slid roughly 4% during Wednesday afternoon’s session in Hong Kong. 1
Alibaba’s exit comes at a tricky time. Qwen is key to its ambition of ramping up cloud and consumer services linked to generative AI, with the company pitching itself as a major Chinese player in the sector.
Chinese tech companies have been jostling for user attention and developer loyalty, ramping up new model launches and pushing apps hard ahead of the Lunar New Year. In February, Qwen’s mobile app notched 203 million monthly active users—up sharply from 31.05 million in January. That figure put it third worldwide, trailing only OpenAI’s ChatGPT and ByteDance’s Doubao, AICPB.com reported. 2
“Bye my beloved Qwen,” Lin posted on X. Yu Bowen, who oversaw post-training for Qwen—the fine-tuning phase for getting a base model ready for specific tasks—also stepped down Wednesday, according to Chinese outlet LatePost. Alibaba has put out over 400 open-source Qwen models since 2023, and those have racked up more than 1 billion downloads, the report noted. 3
Lin told TechCrunch he was “stepping down” just one day after Alibaba rolled out four “open-weight” Qwen 3.5 small models, with sizes stretching from 0.8 billion up to 9 billion parameters—a technical shorthand for model heft and compute demands. Tesla CEO Elon Musk chimed in on X, calling the models’ “intelligence density” impressive. Qwen research scientist Wenting Zhao, meanwhile, called Lin’s exit “the end of an era.” 4
Alibaba’s been moving pieces around at its Tongyi Lab, according to Chinese publication Yicai, splitting Qwen out of a single vertical and into different groups like pre-training and post-training. Yicai also pointed to numbers from QuestMobile: ByteDance’s Doubao saw daily active users surge to 145 million during the holiday, compared with 73.5 million for Qwen, and Tencent’s Yuanbao at 40.5 million. 5
Alibaba’s monthly filing on March 3 confirmed the company kept its issued share count steady in February. Ordinary shares listed in Hong Kong stood at 19,099,302,523 at the end of the month. 6
Alibaba started out in e-commerce, but lately it’s banking more on cloud and AI to drive future growth. Its Qwen project is central to that push, as it tries to carve out space alongside rivals like ByteDance’s Doubao and U.S.-based ChatGPT.
Still, nobody seems to know exactly why Lin left. The bigger worry: if more top engineers walk or product releases lose momentum, customers and developers could peel off to competing models. That would make it tougher for Alibaba to cash in on its AI efforts, especially now with the race heating up.
Alibaba stock hovered at HK$129.90 late Wednesday, slipping from its prior HK$134.80 finish. Shares swung between HK$127.70 and HK$133.00 during the session, per Investing.com data. 7
