Recently, Lin Junyang, the head of Alibaba's Qwen, announced his resignation through social media. As of now, Lin has not publicly revealed his next destination, and Alibaba has not made an official response to the matter. According to insiders, this change was sudden, and there is currently no clear successor. Some of his responsibilities may be taken over by external personnel. After the news spread, the AI academic community and developer community reacted strongly. Many researchers expressed their respect using Qwen's iconic "heart and elephant" symbol, and some even compared the impact of his departure to Sam Altman's exit from OpenAI.

Tongyi Qwen (5) Qianwen

At 32 years old, Lin Junyang is the youngest P10-level technical leader at Alibaba. His career reflects the evolution of China's large model wave. He has a cross-disciplinary background in computer science and foreign linguistics from Peking University. Since joining DAMO Academy in 2019, he has advanced four levels in six years. Lin was a core member of the ten-trillion-parameter M6 multimodal model and officially took charge of the Tongyi Qwen series at the end of 2022. Under his leadership, the Qwen family built an open-source ecosystem covering all parameter scales, becoming a benchmark in the global open-source model field.

Since 2024, with the previous head Zhou Chang joining ByteDance, Lin Junyang's position in technology management and ecosystem building has become increasingly prominent. In addition to focusing on large language models, he established a robotics and embodied intelligence team within his team in October 2025, aiming to push AI into the physical world. Lin also has deep academic achievements, with a total citation count of his papers exceeding 42,000 times. As the soul figure of the Qwen open-source system, his departure undoubtedly poses challenges for the continuation of Alibaba's large model strategy and the retention of top technical talent, reflecting the high frequency of talent movement in the current large model industry.