Alibaba
publicThe 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 Qwen3.7 (May 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. Zhou stepped down from that role in June 2026 to become Alibaba’s chief scientist, and in September 2026 Alibaba named Dayiheng Liu, a core Qwen contributor since 2021, Head of the Qwen LLM Project. Former Google DeepMind researcher Hao Zhou was recruited to lead post-training RL. Research also comes from internal teams publishing independently: Accio Team (agentic multimodal), Tongyi Lab, and DAMO Academy divisions.
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People
- Dayiheng Liu OpenReview — Head of Qwen LLM Project (since Sep 2026); previously Pretrain Lead (formerly PhD Sichuan University (2020); joined Alibaba 2021)
- Jingren Zhou (周靖人) Google ScholarOpenReview — Chief Scientist (since Jun 2026); formerly CTO, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, overseeing Qwen (Mar–Jun 2026) (formerly Microsoft Research (Research Partner, 2004-2015); PhD Columbia (2004); BS USTC School of the Gifted Young (1999))
- 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))
- Fei Huang OpenReview — Chief Scientist, Language Technologies, DAMO (formerly IBM Watson; Facebook; PhD Carnegie Mellon)
- Junyang Lin OpenReview — Former Tech Lead (departed Mar 2026; founded an AI startup)
- 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
- 2026-09-21 Alibaba Appoints Dayiheng Liu Head of Qwen LLM Team After Months of Reorganization; Jingren Zhou Moved to Chief Scientist in June — The Information
- 2026-09-10 Occamy-1.0: Alibaba's Accio Team Releases a Cost-Efficient 35B-A3B Co-Work Model Further Trained From Qwen3.6-35B-A3B — arXiv
- 2026-09-07 Qwen-Audio-3.0-ASR Technical Report: MoE LLM-Based Production ASR Across 30 Languages and 16 Chinese Dialects, With a Streaming Variant — arXiv
- 2026-09-02 Qwen3.8-Max-0902 Snapshot Ships: Deeper Coding and Multi-Tool Agent Orchestration on the Same 2.4T MoE at Unchanged $2/$6; qwen3.8-max Auto-Routes to It From Sep 5 — Alibaba Cloud Model Studio
- 2026-07-21 Qwen-Image-3.0: One-Pass Infographic Grids and Readable 10px Text — But No Weights, Benchmarks, or Report (Closed Shift) — The Decoder
- 2026-07-19 Qwen3.8-Max Previewed at WAIC: 2.4T Sparse MoE, First >1T Natively-Multimodal Qwen; Claimed #2 Behind Claude Fable 5 — SCMP
- 2026-07-06 Alibaba Bans Employee Use of Anthropic Tools From July 10, Citing 'Back-Door Security Risks' After Claude Code Watermarking Discovery — CNBC
- 2026-06-24 Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of Largest-Known Distillation Attack: 28.8M Claude Exchanges via ~25,000 Fake Accounts — CNBC
- 2026-05-20 Qwen3.7-Max-Preview Unveiled at Alibaba Cloud Summit — AA Intelligence Index 57 (#1 Among Chinese Labs) — Qwen
- 2026-04-20 Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Alibaba's Most Powerful Model, #1 on Six Coding Benchmarks (AA Intelligence Index 52) — Qwen
- 2026-04-10 Alibaba Token Hub Created: 5 AI Units Consolidated Under CEO Eddie Wu; RMB 380B ($53B) 3-Year Commitment — SCMP
- 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