Did Alibaba just kneecap its powerful Qwen AI team?

carterschonwald

they just released the first small models that i would consider even vaguely articulate for edge inference involving a human. maybe they want to do a mistral and raise a kajillion and work from their home town?

mellosouls

Subject submitted yesterday fwiw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47236390

bhouston

I feel someone just gave them a huge $$$ offer that they couldn't say no too. Given Elon Musk is praising their efforts, and he lost a lot of his original XAI team recently, my money is on Elon.

storus

This feels like a typical sociopathic corporate scenario with mushroom management - let a bunch of nerds develop something new/exciting outside mainstream corporate culture, then once it becomes good enough jump in, cut them off and harvest whatever they produced while reaping all benefits/credits for yourself, then live off mediocre subsequent releases for a while while blaming remaining team members for future failures.

incomingpain

From what I read, he was fired. Which is insane. Obviously he isnt the only lead at alibaba, but qwen as consequence lost many talented people by doing this. It will negatively impact the Qwen team. Qwen4 is going to flop like Lllama 4. I hope those who just quit form their own new lab and start building again.

Reubend

The Qwen team has been putting out great releases lately. I hope that they can continue on that path despite this.

throwpoaster

Perhaps forced to move over to building military and intelligence models.

est

big corp politics. qwen started as the core team of Tongyi dept, which was part of the algorithm & model offerings from Alibaba-Cloud (aliyun) https://tongyi.aliyun.com/ - qwen series for nlp/LLM - wan series for cv/video - fun series for ASR and TTS - icss for AI customer service - lingma for coding - xingchen for metaverse hype - tingwu for podcast/notebooklm Now that's the awkward part: qwen was too successful, a team had more influence than Tongyi and even Aliyun, obviously they started to develop multi-modal capabilities overlapping other team's work, even with their own app, very vertical integrated. But qwen didn't contribute much revenue or DAU/MAU except fame amoung AI communities. Since GPUs were scarce, Alibaba had to balance free open weight models and customer use. In a better world, alibaba might just as well split qwen into an independent entity and IPO it.

nowittyusername

I hope the people from the Qwen team start their own thing or something... But regardless, the work they did will live on as legendary.

cat_plus_plus

Well, Alibaba hiring a Gemini guy to run Qwen suggests they want to make Qwen into a big consumer / enterprise business like Gemini. I am not sure that I blame them even if it clashes with how their top researchers were hoping Qwen would be run. Most obviously it's natural for a company to want to make money on things they paid for developing. But also, the world needs more competition in AI businesses just like it needs competition in AI research. I wouldn't mind Qwen code to grow into a commercial grade competitor to Claude code that is better, faster and cheaper. I am sure the talented researchers can find a new home in Moonshot AI or even US college or startup.

thefounder

Well…Gemini sucks so I don’t know why you would hire someone from that team to lead your AI team.