Alibaba's core AI personnel are resigning amid a shift in the balance between revenue and performance for AI companies.
Lin JunYang, former AI genius at Alibaba. Photo: Pandaily .
On the morning of March 4th, Lin Junyang, the head of engineering at Qwen, posted a status update stating that he had resigned. Just one day earlier, he was still working in the department and had received praise from Elon Musk.
Lin Junyang, born in 1993, is one of Alibaba's youngest P10-level technical leaders. He has long been a pioneer in promoting the Qwen open-source system within the global developer community.
Lin Junyang's post received over 5,000 likes and more than 700 comments overnight, with the majority expressing gratitude to the Qwen team and their contributions to the open-source community from AI companies like MiniMax, Unsloth, and Ollam.
According to Tencent's media reports, Lin Junyang's departure is directly related to the organizational restructuring of the Qwen group carried out by Alibaba's Tongyi Lab. The group, which originally operated vertically, was split into several horizontally specialized teams, reducing Lin Junyang's scope of management.
At Alibaba, Lin Junyang has an inspiring management style that encourages teams to work independently and allows each small team to explore on its own. He believes that the most important thing for any small team leader is to recruit people who are better than themselves.
Lin Junyang's departure has once again reignited debate about open-source platforms. Robin Li of Baidu, who had previously opposed open source, argued it was an "intellectual tax," claiming only closed-source models generate sustainable revenue and investment cycles. However, the success of DeepSeek in 2025 reversed this trend, forcing Baidu to switch to open-source Wenxin.
Meanwhile, ByteDance pursues a closed model to optimize its internal product ecosystem, viewing AI as a revenue-generating tool. Therefore, the competition is gradually revolving around the ability to integrate models and products.
In the open-source market, DeepSeek and Qwen remain crucial infrastructure for the community. However, for a large enterprise, achieving business results is an unavoidable pressure.