The core team of Alibaba's Qianwen (千问) team resigned en masse, prompting Wu Yongming to hold an emergency all-staff meeting. Timeline: March 2nd: Qwen 3.5 released, Elon Musk praised it. March 3rd: Lin Junyang tweeted "bye my beloved qwen". March 4th: Wu Yongming, Jiang Fang, and Zhou Jingren held an all-staff meeting to quell the controversy. What happened? Tongyi Labs decided to break up the previously vertically integrated Qwen team into horizontal groups for pre-training, post-training, and multimodal tasks. Lin Junyang's management scope was reduced. Zhou Hao, a former DeepMind researcher, was parachuted in to take over post-training, reporting directly to Zhou Jingren. Even more devastating was the change in performance metrics—from model performance and open-source influence to the Qianwen App's DAU and commercial revenue. Asking a technical lead with six years of open-source experience to boost C-end DAU is tantamount to undermining someone's authority. A colleague's comment put it clearly: "Leaving wasn't his choice." The HR representative made a blunt statement at the meeting: "We can't elevate people to a pedestal, and the company can't accept irrational demands to retain them." Open-source ideals clashed with the KPIs of a large company; separation was inevitable.

Beyond organization, resources and politics may also be contributing factors to the dilemma. You can check out this in-depth analysis below 👇 twitter.com/BiteyeCN/status/20...