(Yicai) March 4 -- Lin Junyang, the technical leader of Alibaba Group Holding's Qwen team, said he has stepped down from the position, becoming the third senior executive to leave the Chinese tech giant's artificial intelligence assistant this year.

"Me stepping down. Bye my beloved Qwen," Lin said on social media today, without disclosing his next steps or naming a successor. Just two days ago, the tool had open-sourced four small-sized Qwen3.5 models, which received praise from Elon Musk.

Born in 1993, Lin joined Alibaba's Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook, better known as DAMO Academy, in 2019 with a master's degree in linguistics from Peking University. He became the youngest P10-level tech lead at the Hangzhou-based firm last year.

Lin's departure is closely related to the organizational adjustments at the Qwen team. Alibaba's Tongyi Laboratory plans to split Qwen from the "vertical integration" system that covers various training processes and modalities into horizontal division teams, including pre-training, post-training, text, and multimodal, reducing Lin's management role.

In addition, Lin believes that pre-training, post-training, and Infra should collaborate more closely, while Qwen has been building its own Infra team since mid-last year.

Qwen has contradictions between its commercialization and technical approach, according to analysts. It has many followers in the global open-source community, but this approach has restricted Alibaba's ability to directly generate revenue through application programming interfaces.

Alibaba debuted the Qwen large model series in August 2023 and launched the AI application Qwen targeting the consumer market last November, with Lin as key leader.

Yu Bowen, head of Qwen's post-training, also left on March 2, with his duties taken over by Zhou Hao, a former senior researcher at Google DeepMind, who joined Tongyi Lab early this year and reports to Zhou Jingren, chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud. Hui Bin, head of Qwen Code, resigned in January and joined Meta.

Lin, Yu, and Hui joined Alibaba as fresh graduates and participated in the early training of the Qwen model.

During this year's Chinese New Year holiday, ByteDance Technology's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen, and Tencent Holdings' Yuanbao had a peak of daily active users of 145 million, 73.5 million, and 40.5 million, respectively, according to the latest data from third-party research firm QuestMobile. Qwen saw the highest growth rate at 940 percent.

Editor: Martin Kadiev