Did Alibaba just kneecap its powerful Qwen AI team? Key figures depart in wake of latest open source release

Alibaba's Qwen team of AI researchers have been among the most prolific and well-regarded by international machine learning community — shipping dozens of powerful generalized and specialized generative models starting last summer, most of them entirely open source and free.

But now, just 24 hours after shipping the open source Qwen3.5 small model series—a release that drew public praise from Elon Musk for its "impressive intelligence density"—the project’s technical architect and several other Qwen team members have exited the company under unclear circumstances, raising questions and concerns from around the world about the future direction of the Qwen team and its focus on open source.

The departure of Junyang "Justin" Lin, the technical lead who steered Qwen from a nascent lab project to a global powerhouse with over 600 million downloads, alongside two fellow colleagues — staff research scientist Binyuan Hui and intern Kaixin Li — marks a ...