Alibaba
corporateThe Qwen team is Alibaba Group's flagship large model effort and the most prolific contributor to the open-source AI ecosystem globally, with over 1 billion total downloads on HuggingFace. Originally developed within the DAMO Academy (established 2017) under the Tongyi Qianwen brand, the team evolved through predecessor projects including M6 (10T sparse MoE, 2021) and OFA (ICML 2022). Models are served commercially through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio.
The Qwen series has progressed from Qwen (2023) through Qwen3.5 (February 2026) at remarkable speed, spanning dense and MoE architectures across text, code, math, vision, audio, and omni modalities. Qwen3 introduced hybrid thinking with seamless reasoning mode-switching; Qwen3.5 (397B-A17B) supports 201 languages and 1M-token context. Alibaba has committed $53 billion over three years (2025–2028) for AI and cloud infrastructure, the largest private technology investment in Chinese history.
In March 2026, the team underwent a significant restructuring: Tech Lead Junyang Lin, post-training head Bowen Yu, and coding lead Binyuan Hui all departed. Alibaba responded by creating a new "Token Hub" business group under CEO Eddie Wu, with CTO Jingren Zhou (ACM Fellow, PhD Columbia, ex-Microsoft Research) taking direct oversight of Qwen model development. Former Google DeepMind researcher Hao Zhou was recruited to lead post-training RL.
People
- Jingren Zhou OpenReview — CTO, Alibaba Cloud; Director, Tongyi Lab (formerly Microsoft Research (2004-2015); PhD Columbia)
- Hao Zhou — Head of Post-Training RL (since Mar 2026) (formerly Google DeepMind (Sr. Staff Research Scientist; Gemini 3 contributor))
- Shuai Bai OpenReview — Vision Lead (Qwen-VL)
- An Yang OpenReview — Core Researcher (formerly Peking University (BS, MS))
- Dayiheng Liu OpenReview — Pretrain Lead (formerly PhD Sichuan University)
- Fei Huang OpenReview — Chief Scientist, Language Technologies, DAMO (formerly IBM Watson; Facebook; PhD Carnegie Mellon)
- Junyang Lin OpenReview — Former Tech Lead (departed Mar 2026)
- Binyuan Hui OpenReview — Former Coding Lead (departed Jan 2026 to Meta)
- Yongbin Li Google Scholar — Principal Research Scientist, Tongyi Lab (Tongyi Lingma coding copilot) (formerly PhD Tsinghua University)
News
- 2026-04-02 Alibaba Unveils Third Closed-Source AI Model in Focus on Profit — Bloomberg
- 2026-03-25 Alibaba Launches AI Model Task Force; Top Researcher Resigns — The Information