So, Alibaba Group Holding Limited (BABA) is doing some reorganizing. The Chinese tech giant is reshuffling the deck around its Qwen artificial intelligence project, bringing in new talent, changing up leadership, and—oh yeah—vehemently denying that everyone is quitting.
This comes as competition in China's AI market gets fiercer by the day. After a key technical leader for the Qwen model left, CEO Eddie Wu sent out an internal email to address the situation. He announced that Alibaba Cloud CTO Zhou Jingren will continue to lead the Tongyi Lab. More importantly, the company is setting up a new "foundation model support group." Think of it as a central hub to coordinate resources and people across the whole company for large-scale AI model development.
Wu's message was clear: building these foundational AI models is not a side project. It's a long-term, strategic priority. Alibaba plans to stick with its open-source model strategy, pump more money into AI R&D, and go hard after top talent.
The departure that sparked this was Lin Junyang, a core leader of the Qwen model. Not long after he announced his exit on social media, Yu Bowen, the head of post-training for Qwen, also said he was leaving. That's two high-profile exits back-to-back, which is probably where those "collective resignation" rumors started bubbling up.
But here's the twist: Alibaba isn't just watching people walk out the door. It's already bringing someone new in. The company has reportedly hired Zhou Hao, a former senior staff research scientist at Alphabet Inc.'s (GOOGL) Google DeepMind, to lead post-training research for the Qwen models. He's taking over Yu Bowen's old role.
Zhou holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and, according to his LinkedIn profile, worked on several Google AI products including Gemini 3. So, it's a pretty significant hire—poaching from one of the world's top AI labs to bolster your own team doesn't exactly scream "project in crisis."
As for the folks who left, Junyang was one of Alibaba's youngest P10-level technical leaders. He led the development of the massive Qwen3-Max model, which has over a trillion parameters, and later helped guide the release of the more compact Qwen3.5 series.
Alibaba is pushing back hard on the narrative that these departures were about pressure to commercialize. The company says the Qwen base model team isn't even evaluated on stuff like daily active users. Their stated goal is much loftier: to push the limits of model intelligence and ultimately march toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI. The company insists the team is stable and that talk of a mass exodus is just speculation.
In the markets, Alibaba shares were up 0.47% at $131.41 at the time of publication on Monday.
