Alibaba Group Holding is restructuring leadership inside its artificial intelligence division after the resignation of a key executive overseeing its Qwen large language model (LLM) initiative and the formation of a new internal task force to guide the company’s next phase of AI development.
Lin Junyang, a senior technical leader of Alibaba’s Qwen AI project, announced in early March that he was leaving the company. Lin disclosed the move in a brief message posted on X.
“Bye my beloved Qwen,” he wrote. He did not offer further explanation for his departure, according to Reuters.
Alibaba confirmed the leadership change internally. It said it is establishing a new task force to coordinate AI development across the company, Reuters reported.
Alibaba owns the world’s two largest online marketplaces by gross merchandise value (GMV), Taobao and Tmall.
Taobao ranks No. 1 in the Global Online Marketplaces Database, Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest such marketplaces by third-party GMV.
Tmall ranks No. 2. Both platforms operate in China and primarily serve the Chinese market. Among Alibaba’s other marketplaces is the global B2B marketplace Alibaba.com.
New AI leadership at Alibaba
The task force will be led by several senior executives, including Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu, group chief technology officer Wu Zeming and Alibaba Cloud CTO Zhou Jingren, who will continue overseeing Tongyi Laboratory, the company’s core AI research unit.
Lin’s departure is part of a broader series of leadership changes inside the Qwen organization. Reuters reported that Yu Bowen, who led post-training work on the Qwen models, also resigned in early March, while research scientist Hui Binyuan left the project earlier this year.
Despite turnover, Qwen has seen rapid growth. The Qwen consumer AI application reached approximately 203 million monthly active users in February, up from about 31 million in January, according to AI product tracker AICPB.com, Reuters reported.
Alibaba has also expanded the model family aggressively. Since 2023, the company has released more than 400 open-source Qwen models that together have surpassed 1 billion downloads, according to Reuters.
At the same time, Alibaba is recruiting new AI research talent. The South China Morning Post, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Alibaba hired Zhou Hao, a former senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind, to lead post-training research for Qwen models, replacing Yu Bowen. The report said Zhou previously worked on Google AI systems including Gemini-related research. Alibaba has not publicly confirmed the hire.
The leadership changes come as Alibaba increases its focus on generative AI and foundation models, which the company views as a core growth area alongside its cloud computing business.
By placing senior executives directly in charge of the initiative while recruiting additional AI researchers, Alibaba is tightening oversight of its AI development efforts as competition intensifies among global technology companies building LLMs.
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