Alibaba Group's AI wizard who warned of US-China tech gap steps down

The architect of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s chief AI model has quit his post, a surprise departure that’s rattled the developer community and raised questions about the Chinese online leader’s pivot to artificial intelligence. 

 

Junyang Lin, who also goes by Justin, announced on X he was stepping down as the tech lead for Qwen, Alibaba’s main AI platform. That early morning post triggered a surge of support from the open-source community. Alibaba’s shares slid as much as 5.3 per cent in Hong Kong — their biggest intraday loss since October — in part because investors are unwinding AI-related trades given global uncertainty.

 

Lin is one of the most influential figures behind Alibaba’s transition to AI, an endeavor intended to drive its next phase of growth beyond online commerce. During his tenure, the Qwen series of models became the foundation for Alibaba’s marquee AI app and services, and consistently ranked among the world’s top-performing platforms. 

 

That placed the online company among the frontrunners of a broader effort by Chinese firms to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. Qwen’s advances this week drew the attention of Elon Musk, who commented on its “impressive” density.

 

“me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen,” Lin wrote on X, without elaborating. 

 

The reasons behind Lin’s exit remain unclear. The AI engineer, who last year set up a new robotics team, had been posting updates about Qwen on X just a day before. And Alibaba last month unveiled a major upgrade to that marquee platform, designed to support AI agentic tasks as well as handle text, photo and video inputs. 

 

Lin and Alibaba representatives didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.   

 

Lin’s revelation — which spurred more than a thousand replies including well-wishes and questions within hours — casts a cloud over Alibaba’s AI ambitions. At least one other Alibaba engineer announced he was departing in the wake of Lin’s post. MiniMax Group Inc. — an Alibaba investee and AI pioneer — thanked Lin for his contributions to the open-source community.

 

Alibaba has been among the most aggressive investors in and advocates for AI since DeepSeek fired up the local tech industry.

 

In 2025, the company better known for creating China’s biggest online marketplace declared it was going all-in on AI and the pursuit of super-intelligence, while building a suite of AI services and products centered on Qwen technology. Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu pledged more than $53 billion toward infrastructure and AI development — an outlay he’s said the company could surpass over time.

 

Lin had been working on building generalist models at Alibaba since 2022 and oversaw its open-source initiatives, according to his LinkedIn profile. He holds a master’s degree from Peking University.

 

In one of his last public appearances as Qwen head, Lin told a forum in Beijing in January that Chinese companies were unlikely to leapfrog the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic with fundamental breakthroughs in AI over the next three to five years.

 

“A massive amount of OpenAI’s compute is dedicated to next-generation research, whereas we are stretched thin — just meeting delivery demands consumes most of our resources,” Lin said at the time. 

What Bloomberg Intelligence Says 

The departure of Junyang Lin, tech lead for Alibaba’s Qwen open-source model, is unlikely to impact the tech giant’s AI development. Monetizing AI remains the key challenge for Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, in a commoditized sector that’s awash with largely undifferentiated, free-to-access AI apps. The rising, though minor, profit contribution from Alibaba’s cloud-intelligence division won’t offset pressure in its core e-commerce and food-delivery business - Robert Lea and Jasmine Lyu, analysts

 

His departure follows a recent flurry of activity.

 

Alibaba, which also operates a Netflix Inc.-like streaming service and one of China’s biggest meal delivery platforms, revamped its mobile app Qwen in November as a major step into consumer-facing AI services. 

 

It plans to build the app into an all-around personal assistant by gradually integrating individual services under the Alibaba umbrella. 

 

In January, it linked its flagship online shopping and travel services to Qwen, taking its biggest step yet to build the app into a one-stop artificial intelligence platform for consumers.