On Tuesday, March 3, Junyang Lin posted two words on X: “bye my beloved qwen.” The post came hours after his team launched Qwen 3.5 Small Models, and within hours it had drawn hundreds of retweets and thousands of likes — a response that reflects how central Lin had become to the global open-source AI community, not just Alibaba’s internal team.
Two colleagues followed him out the same day. Kaixin Li, a core contributor to Qwen 3.5, posted on-record: “Now that he’s gone, there’s no reason left to stay.” Binyuan Hui, who led Qwen’s code development and the Qwen-Coder series, posted “bye qwen, me too” and updated his X profile to say “former MTS at Qwen.” TechCrunch reported that Wenting Zhao, a research scientist on the team, described the departure as “the end of an era.” Alibaba has not disclosed reasons for any of the departures and did not respond to a request for comment.
According to TechNode, citing people familiar with the matter, Lin submitted his resignation March 3 and the departure was communicated within the Qwen team shortly after. TechNode also reported that Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab — which houses the Qwen project — is undergoing internal organizational adjustments, including plans to reorganize its model development teams. Per Reuters, cited by FinanceFeeds, this marks the third high-profile departure from Qwen in 2026.
A colleague’s public message suggested the departures may not have been voluntary, though Alibaba has not commented. Qwen’s mobile app reportedly surpassed 203 million monthly active users in February, according to AI product tracking service AICPB.com. Tracking data cited by Reuters placed the Qwen app third globally behind ChatGPT and Doubao. BABA shares fell approximately 5.3% in US ADR trading on March 3 — their largest single-day decline since October — according to market data reported by multiple financial outlets. That figure reflects the intraday peak; the closing decline was smaller.
Open-source projects run on people. The model weights don’t walk out with departing researchers. The roadmap priorities, the developer relationships, and the institutional knowledge do. Three senior departures within 24 hours of a product launch — not a down cycle — is structurally unusual enough that Alibaba’s CEO reportedly convened an emergency all-hands meeting in response. No public statement followed.