Alibaba steps up focus on Qwen LLM

Chinese tech heavyweight Alibaba Group is reorganizing leadership and stepping up resources around its Qwen large language model following the departure of a key technical leader, as competition intensifies among China's major tech companies in the fast-growing AI application market.

In an internal e-mail to employees, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu responded to the resignation of Lin Junyang, a core leader of the Qwen model, on Thursday. According to the e-mail, Alibaba Cloud's chief technology officer Zhou Jingren would continue to lead the Tongyi Lab. The company will also establish a foundation model support group to mobilize group-wide resources for large model development.

Wu stressed that building foundational large models is a key long-term strategy for the company, and Alibaba will continue to adhere to its open-source model strategy while further increasing investment in artificial intelligence research and development and stepping up efforts to attract top talent.

Alibaba's response came after Lin announced his departure on social media on Wednesday. Yu Bowen, head of post-training for the Qwen model, also announced his departure from the company shortly afterward.

Born in 1993, Lin was one of Alibaba's youngest P10-level technical leaders. He led the development of the Qwen3-Max model, which features more than 1 trillion parameters, and later guided the release of the Qwen3.5 series of smaller models.

Responding to speculation that the departures of key personnel may be linked to the introduction of commercialization targets for the foundation model team, Alibaba Group told China Daily late Thursday that the base model team has never been assessed using commercial metrics such as daily active users (DAU).

"The goal of the Qwen large model is to continuously push the limits of model intelligence and ultimately move toward artificial general intelligence (AGI)," the company said.

It also said that the Qwen model team remains stable, dismissing claims of a "collective resignation".

Although the company has denied market speculation linking the recent personnel changes to commercialization pressures, such discussions largely reflect the intensifying competition faced by Qwen in China's fast-growing AI application market.

Data from internet analytics firm QuestMobile showed that AI applications reached record DAU levels during this year's Spring Festival holiday. ByteDance's Doubao recorded a peak of 145 million DAUs, followed by Alibaba's Qwen at 73.52 million and Tencent's Yuanbao at 40.54 million — showing that Qwen's user scale was roughly half that of Doubao.

To gain an upper hand in the competition, major Chinese tech companies have launched aggressive promotional campaigns to attract users to their AI applications.

Tencent's Yuanbao entered the competition with 1 billion yuan ($145 million) in cash red packets, Baidu's Wenxin invested 500 million yuan to strengthen its "search + AI" information distribution advantages, and ByteDance's Doubao partnered exclusively with the CMG Spring Festival Gala, reaching a nationwide audience. Qwen also joined the competition, launching a 3 billion yuan "Spring Festival Treat" campaign aimed at integrating AI applications with consumer transactions.

According to Cao Lei, an expert committee member of the China Advertising Association, the AI "red packet war" could mark a pivotal moment in China's transition from the mobile internet era to AI-driven internet.

"Just as WeChat red packets reshaped the payment landscape in the mobile internet era, the AI-era red packet competition could reshape the future internet ecosystem," Cao said. "Whoever first establishes long-term user dependence on AI assistants may gain control of digital traffic distribution over the next decade," he added.

Against the backdrop of intensifying competition, Alibaba founder Jack Ma has also made several rare public appearances, which have been widely interpreted as a signal of the company's determination to strengthen its position in the AI era.

On Feb 4, ahead of the Spring Festival AI competition, Ma visited the office of the Qwen project team at Alibaba's headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. Earlier this week, he also appeared at a school in Hangzhou together with the company's core management team, where they discussed with educators the challenges and opportunities brought on by AI.

"We came here together to tell everyone that this change (of AI) will come very quickly. Education needs to respond swiftly to help children learn to coexist with AI and adapt to this enormous transformation," Ma said during the school visit.

lijiaying@chinadaily.com.cn