Alibaba's AI Drama

This post originally appeared in Interconnected.

“No matter what happens to Qwen next, its era of being small and beautiful is over.”

If you are a normal consumer of news, your timeline is likely flooded with minute-to-minute updates on the war in Iran, or the latest intrigues between Anthropic, OpenAI and the Department of War. For me, for better or worse, my timeline over the last 24 hours has been taken over by the potential mass exodus of the core members of Alibaba’s Qwen AI team, starting with its technical leader and arguably the face of the whole project: Junyang Lin.

I say “potential”, because the situation is still fluid. There is rumor that Junyang may return to Alibaba, after his very public resignation. There is now a leaked emergency all-hands meeting convened by Eddie Wu, the CEO of Alibaba Group (and the Alibaba Cloud division), as well as Alibaba Cloud CTO and the Group’s Chief People Office, to address this crisis moment. What does not help the matter is that Alibaba’s earnings release has been delayed, and yet to be announced as of this post’s publication, already spooking the investor class.