Departure of Qwen project leader at Alibaba linked to internal competition
Lin Jun, the technical head of the AI team behind Alibaba’s Qwen model, left the company on March 4 due to intense internal competition among several groups working on large language models. His departure, along with several key researchers, quickly spread across the industry and came as a surprise to the company’s leadership.
On the same day, Alibaba held an emergency meeting with CEO Eddie Wu. A few weeks prior, Lin’s team had released an updated version of the Qwen 3.5 model. According to sources, Lin was engaged in internal “competition” with another leading expert in the field, Steven Hoe.
This situation highlights the challenges of managing large-scale AI projects and could signal further personnel changes within Alibaba.
