The technical lead of the Tongyi Qianwen large model, Lin Jinyang, recently announced his resignation on a social media platform, an event that has attracted widespread attention in the field of large models.
Lin Jinyang posted a message on the social media platform X stating, "I will resign, goodbye to my beloved Qianwen." As the youngest P10-level technical leader at Alibaba, Lin was born in 1993 and studied at Peking University for both his bachelor's and master's degrees. He holds a combined background in computer science and linguistics, which is considered a key factor in Tongyi Qianwen's outstanding performance in semantic understanding and long-text processing.
Lin joined Alibaba DAMO Academy in 2019 and officially became the technical lead for the Tongyi Qianwen series of large models after the establishment of the Tongyi Lab at the end of 2022. During his tenure, Tongyi Qianwen has consistently pursued an open-source approach, maintaining a leading position on global open-source rankings such as Hugging Face. In early March 2026, the team released the widely praised Qwen 3.5 series of small models. The series has gained significant attention on overseas social media platforms, even receiving a like from Elon Musk.
This resignation came as a surprise. Just two days before Lin's announcement, he was still promoting the release of the Qwen 3.5 small model. His colleague Chen Cheng later posted on the social media platform, stating that leaving was not Lin's decision, and implying that the team was still working together to launch a new model just before the resignation.
At present, Lin's future remains unclear. According to sources, due to the sudden nature of the event, there is currently no clear direct successor within the Tongyi Qianwen team. The public is closely watching whether Lin will remain within the Alibaba Group for a transfer or follow the example of Zhou Chang by starting his own business or joining another team.
As a key driver behind China's open-source large models, Lin's departure is seen as an important milestone for the Tongyi Qianwen project. With the model's download count exceeding 600 million and more than 170,000 derivative models, it remains to be seen whether the change in technical leadership will affect the continuity and technological development of this open-source series. The subsequent organizational restructuring by Alibaba Cloud will need to be observed. As of now, Alibaba has not yet issued an official statement regarding this personnel change.
