Elon Musk Praised Alibaba’s LLM. Then Its Leader Quit: ‘Bye My Beloved Qwen’ (UPDATED)

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include a response from Alibaba

Lin Junyang, head of Alibaba Group‘s Qwen artificial intelligence division, announced on Tuesday that he is stepping down.

The announcement comes just two days after the company rolled out its updated AI products.

Lin posted on X: “me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen.”

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Two other team members followed Junyang’s exit.

Binyuan Hui, a research scientist at Alibaba Qwen Team, posted “bye qwen, me too.”

Kaixin Li, a core contributor to Qwen 3.5, also signed off, noting that Lin had been the driving force behind a potential Qwen Singapore base and writing, “Now that he’s gone, there’s no reason left to stay.”

Musk-Backed Launch Amplifies Exit

Alibaba launched four Qwen 3.5 Small Models—0.6B, 2B, 4B, and 9B parameters—built as native multimodal models for on-device AI and lightweight agents.

The launch drew Elon Musk, who wrote on X that the models showed “impressive intelligence density.”

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Lin responded simply: “thx elon!” — before announcing his resignation the same day.

Explosive User Growth Raises Stakes

The departure also comes as Qwen’s mobile app surged to 203 million monthly active users in February, up from 31.05 million in January, according to AICPB.com, which tracks AI products.

A successor has not yet been named.

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Eddie Wu Message’s To Alibaba Cloud Research Unit

Alibaba shared with Benzinga an email sent by CEO Eddie Wu to staff at Tongyi Laboratory, the core research unit under Alibaba Cloud. In the message, Wu said the company had accepted Lin’s resignation and announced plans to form a new “Foundation Model Task Force.” The task force will be led by Wu and include Alibaba Cloud CTO Jingren Zhou and Alibaba executive Fan Luyuan.

“Advancing foundation models is a core strategic priority for our future. While continuing to uphold our open-source model strategy, we will further scale up investment in AI research and development, accelerate the recruitment of top talent,” wrote Wu in the communication.

Alibaba Market Standing

Alibaba Group has a market capitalization of $323.71 billion, with a 52-week high of $192.67 and a 52-week low of $95.73.

The stock of the Chinese multinational technology conglomerate has a Relative Strength Index (RSI) of 23.57.

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This article Elon Musk Praised Alibaba’s LLM. Then Its Leader Quit: ‘Bye My Beloved Qwen’ (UPDATED) originally appeared on Benzinga.com

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