Alibaba internal email responds to Lin Junyang's departure

On the morning of March 5, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu Yongming responded to Lin Junyang’s resignation in an internal email. He stated that the company will continue to adhere to the open-source model strategy and will keep increasing investment in AI research and development as well as efforts to attract outstanding talent.

The full text of the email——

To all colleagues at Tongyi Lab:

The company has decided to approve Lin Junyang’s resignation. We thank Lin Junyang for his contributions during his tenure. Jingren will continue to lead Tongyi Lab in advancing subsequent work. At the same time, the company will establish a foundational model support team, jointly coordinated by myself, Jingren, and Fan Yu, to support the development of foundational models with group resources.

If technological development does not progress, it regresses. Developing large foundational models is our key strategic focus for the future. While continuing to follow the open-source model strategy, we will steadily increase R&D investment in artificial intelligence and intensify efforts to attract top talent. Let’s work together and keep pushing forward.

Eddie Wu Yongming

March 5, 2026

Earlier, on March 4, Lin Junyang, a senior algorithms expert at Alibaba and the head of the Tongyi Qianwen large model, posted on a social platform that he would leave the Qianwen team. It is understood that Lin Junyang is the person responsible for the Qianwen large model at Alibaba.

In terms of his professional background, Lin Junyang is the youngest P10 in Alibaba’s history. Since joining Alibaba in 2019, he has been with the company for nearly 7 years. Before stepping down, he served as the head of Alibaba’s Qianwen large model and was a core member of the Tongyi Laboratory within Alibaba Group.

Lin Junyang was born in 1993 and holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in linguistics from Peking University. After earning his master’s degree, in 2019, he joined Alibaba’s DAMO Academy Intelligent Computing Laboratory, becoming an algorithms expert and participating in the development of Alibaba’s multimodal pretraining model, M6.

In 2022, after Alibaba DAMO Academy reorganized multiple research teams on Alibaba Cloud, Tongyi Laboratory was established. Lin Junyang transferred from DAMO Academy to Tongyi Laboratory and was officially appointed as the technical lead for the Qianwen series large models.

The Qianwen large model has gradually grown into one of the strongest open-source models worldwide in the AI large-model competition. On April 29, 2025, Alibaba open-sourced the Qwen3 series models. In multiple authoritative evaluations, they surpassed the top global open-source models of the same period, officially ranking as the world’s strongest open-source model. As of January 2026, the latest data from Hugging Face, the world’s largest open-source AI community, shows that the number of derivative models based on Qianwen has exceeded 200,000, and the total downloads of Qianwen series models have surpassed 1 billion, firmly establishing its position as the leading open-source large model globally.