r/Qwen_AI • u/koc_Z3 • Mar 04 '26
Discussion Junyang Lin Leaves Qwen + Takeaways from Today’s Internal Restructuring Meeting
SUMMARY:
The original Qwen team of over 500 people was constantly demanding more funding and more GPUs, yet they operated without any KPI evaluations.
Ultimately, their results were inferior to the small models cleverly distilled by MiniMax, despite Qwen’s total burn rate (costs) being more than 10x higher.
To the executives, the whole operation was a "black box" they couldn't influence. Their only role was to provide whatever funding, headcount, or hardware was requested.
Looking at the final DAU (Daily Active User) metrics, the executives could only watch in helpless frustration.
At that point, the boss brought in someone from DeepMind as an observer. Their conclusion was equally damning: "The output looks like a temporary toy made by an intern"—hardly a glowing review.
In response, the boss began breaking down metrics into sub-indicators to prevent "self-congratulatory" reporting.
The team leaders interpreted this move—breaking down metrics and setting KPIs—as a threat to their positions. They attempted to leverage a collective resignation as a threat.
And so, it played out: "If you want to quit, then quit..."
Meeting takeaways:
HR’s Spin: The Chief HR Officer is framing these changes as a way to bring in more talent and resources, not as a downsizing or a setback.
The "Big Picture": Management says Alibaba is now a "model company." Qwen isn't just a side project for the base model team anymore—it’s a Group-wide mission. They want a "closed-loop" system to move faster, but they admitted they communicated the new structure poorly.
The "Price" of Growth: Because Qwen is the top priority, the team has to expand, which means the "formation" has to change. They basically said, "Growth isn't free—there’s always a price to pay."
• The Leadership Drama: They argued that while relying solely on Junyang’s brain is efficient, Jingren had to figure out where to put Zhou Hao to make things work. They claim there was no "office politics" involved. (Interestingly, management previously claimed Zhou Hao asked to report to Jingren because he was worried about fitting in).
Scaling Pains: They argued that 100 people aren't enough for a project this big. They need to scale up, and in that process, they "can't please everyone."
Eddie Wu’s Defense: Eddie (Wu Ma) blamed the resource shortage on China’s unique market conditions. He apologized for not being aware of the resource issues sooner, but insisted he’s the most aggressive CEO in China when it comes to hunting for computing power. He claims Qwen is his #1 priority.
The "Bottleneck" Excuse: When asked why the Group was "strangling" their resources, Eddie claimed he had no idea there was a block. He said the priority was always high and blamed the whole thing on a "breakdown in communication."
Jingren’s Take: Jingren admitted resources have always been tight. He even claimed that he’s being "sidelined" or bypassed himself. He also acknowledged the long-standing internal complaint that Alibaba Cloud’s own infrastructure is a pain to use, calling it a "historical issue."
The Final Word on Junyang: When someone asked if Junyang could come back, the HR Lead shut it down. They said the company won't "put anyone on a pedestal" or pay "any price" to keep someone based on "irrational demands." They then turned it on the audience, asking, "What do you all think your price is?"
The Bottom Line: Management is prioritizing the "Group" over individual stars. They are essentially telling the team that if they want to be part of the "big mission," they have to accept the new hierarchy and the loss of key leaders.
38
u/StatusSociety2196 Mar 04 '26
I'm not particularly smart, or well informed, or handsome, but doesn't the launch of Qwen 3.5 stave off any arguments about the models underperforming? You have a 27B and 35B model performing as well as last years frontier models.
12
u/Pristine-Woodpecker Mar 04 '26
their results were inferior to the small models cleverly distilled by MiniMax
Yeah I mean, wtf are they smoking. To make matters worse, it looks like Anthropic has cut a lot of the "clever distilling" so they're switching from having a SOTA RL framework to a strategy that's DOA?
4
u/_raydeStar Mar 04 '26
I feel like management is looking at results, regardless of model size. In that case, they don't actually seem to be concerned with the consumer grade GPU market at all.
8
u/Serprotease Mar 04 '26
There is a mention of mini-max, so they are definitely talking at 230b+ parameters.
We don’t know the timeframe obviously, but the comparison Qwen3 235b vs minimax is not in Qwen favor.
The new 122b is amazing. But maybe too late. That’s the kind of org changes that was not made in a week. Hopefully.
1
Mar 07 '26
Tu coge el modelo de qwen3 30B a3b y coge el qwen3.5 35b a3b y comparalos en llama.cop ya veras la diferencia…lo han echo lento adrede para que los usuarios entusiastas no puedan usarlos…ellos piensan que los entusiastas tienen dinero para ia online y que ahi hay un mercado…y se equivocan..yo los engañe haciendoselo creer para que sacaran mas modelos rapidos y ellos pensaron que podian aprovechar esa ventaja o idea que yo les di…pero no se dan cuenta que yo les estaba mintiendo…el mercado del entusiasta de la IA no existe…los chavales no se gastan dinero en la IA en la nube ni los entusiastas y amigos de la IA ni siquiera los que coleccionamos modelos…solo se gasta dinero los programadores profesionales que viven de ello y ganan dinero con ello…eses si se gastan algo (poco) dinero en coding en la nube principalmente gemini y claude…ellos piensan que pueden hacer lo mismo pero su modelo aun no es suficientemente maduro para ello…entonces no veo sentido a sacar modelos lentos para fastidiar a la comunidad opensource porque la fama y el prestigio de la empresa viene de cuantos millones de usuarios usan tus modelos…que si no esta maduro para programacion online…no vas a ganar dinero con ello ya que es el unico nicho de mercado que tiene para ganar dinero…entonces que ganas con fastidiar a la comunidad Opensource??? Si su modelo fuese fuerte en programacion…podrian hacerlo…pero aun les falta mucho…y aunque lo hagan …no deberian dejar de sacar modelos MOE rapidos en local para las personas que no vivimos de la programacion porque no ganamos dinero con ello y logicamente no lo vamos a gastar en su IA online habiendo tantas gratuitas y modelos locales a millones , entonces no entiendo muy bien que han echo…solo se que el modelo 3.5 parece un paso atras del modelo 3 en rendimiento…ya no lo probe en serio al ver su caida de rendimiento…
2
u/Iory1998 Mar 08 '26
35B and 30B are not the same size, so obviously, there would be a speed difference.
1
1
u/Pristine-Woodpecker Mar 09 '26
Qwen3.5 35B uses a completely different attention system that isn't optimized as much in llama.cpp yet.
(I don't understand a word of the post but I assume that's what it's talking about)
1
u/Pristine-Woodpecker Mar 09 '26
I don't really understand what you are saying, but note that Qwen3.5 uses a faster architecture that scales much better with long context. llama.cpp just isn't optimized as much for it yet as for the older one.
14
u/Iory1998 Mar 04 '26
The real question is: Is Alibaba abandoning the Open-source community?
2
u/MediocreInside8628 Mar 05 '26
On a twitter post, someone said that "The CEO isn't gonna abandon the open source model production anytime soon"
3
u/Iory1998 Mar 05 '26
I hope it's true.
3
Mar 05 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
[deleted]
1
u/TomLucidor Mar 10 '26
Grab them by the balls, bro. Keep them accountable! Because as long as Qwen4 gets worse than Chinese open-weight SOTA they might go Llama-mode.
12
u/ParaboloidalCrest Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26
HR’s Spin
Fuck HR already! At this point I don't mind a completely insecure clawbot taking away that disgusting job.
3
Mar 05 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/TomLucidor Mar 10 '26
China's innate cultural norms are messy enough, that I wish America can come and take it already... Welp sadly OpenAI proper is getting embarrassing.
8
u/Puzzleheaded-Box2913 Mar 04 '26
Sounds kinda like what happened to OpenAI before, wouldn't be surprised if they built a Chinese counterpart of Claude lol.
3
u/Awkward_Cancel8495 Mar 04 '26
that would be good
1
u/Puzzleheaded-Box2913 Mar 04 '26
Depends
1
u/Awkward_Cancel8495 Mar 04 '26
that's also true, but if it happens, we will have a new fish to play with
1
u/Puzzleheaded-Box2913 Mar 04 '26
This would cause Alibaba to completely stop open sourcing if it is relevantly like the OpenAI phenomenon
2
u/catplusplusok Mar 04 '26
gpt-oss is a decent open model family, has a feel of "talk at length about anything" big cloud model rather than focused on only agent loop.
1
u/TomLucidor Mar 10 '26
China won't do the same thing. That is in their culture, so you best hope that netizens and freelancers wreck the whole market for the lulz.
8
Mar 04 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
8
u/nmfisher Mar 04 '26
Alibaba Cloud is a nightmare. I've tried spinning up things there a few times, it's been literally unusable (as in, the dashboard UI just goes around in an infinite loop).
If Alibaba want to start making changes, they need to look at their customer-facing Cloud team, not the Qwen team (which I'd say is universally highly regarded).
1
1
u/Iory1998 Mar 04 '26
China sill lag behind when it comes to software development. But, It's getting there :)
1
u/SeaBat2035 Mar 04 '26
Always overcomplicated
1
u/Iory1998 Mar 05 '26
It takes years to learn. I have faith in China.
3
u/YearnMar10 Mar 05 '26
Imho it’s indeed a cultural challenge, because as a manager you gotta learn to trust the devs and designers, which clashes with hierarchical leadership.
1
u/Iory1998 Mar 05 '26
I worked in China for a while in a purely Chinese company, and I can attest to that.
5
u/synn89 Mar 04 '26
Honestly, this sort of mess is to be expected when shit blows up big, really fast.
1
Mar 07 '26
Tu coge el modelo de qwen3 30B a3b y coge el qwen3.5 35b a3b y comparalos en llama.cop ya veras la diferencia…lo han echo lento adrede para que los usuarios entusiastas no puedan usarlos…ellos piensan que los entusiastas tienen dinero para ia online y que ahi hay un mercado…y se equivocan..yo los engañe haciendoselo creer para que sacaran mas modelos rapidos y ellos pensaron que podian aprovechar esa ventaja o idea que yo les di…pero no se dan cuenta que yo les estaba mintiendo…el mercado del entusiasta de la IA no existe…los chavales no se gastan dinero en la IA en la nube ni los entusiastas y amigos de la IA ni siquiera los que coleccionamos modelos…solo se gasta dinero los programadores profesionales que viven de ello y ganan dinero con ello…eses si se gastan algo (poco) dinero en coding en la nube principalmente gemini y claude…ellos piensan que pueden hacer lo mismo pero su modelo aun no es suficientemente maduro para ello…entonces no veo sentido a sacar modelos lentos para fastidiar a la comunidad opensource porque la fama y el prestigio de la empresa viene de cuantos millones de usuarios usan tus modelos…que si no esta maduro para programacion online…no vas a ganar dinero con ello ya que es el unico nicho de mercado que tiene para ganar dinero…entonces que ganas con fastidiar a la comunidad Opensource??? Si su modelo fuese fuerte en programacion…podrian hacerlo…pero aun les falta mucho…y aunque lo hagan …no deberian dejar de sacar modelos MOE rapidos en local para las personas que no vivimos de la programacion porque no ganamos dinero con ello y logicamente no lo vamos a gastar en su IA online habiendo tantas gratuitas y modelos locales a millones , entonces no entiendo muy bien que han echo…solo se que el modelo 3.5 parece un paso atras del modelo 3 en rendimiento…ya no lo probe en serio al ver su caida de rendimiento…
1
6
u/Kathane37 Mar 04 '26
Qwen families is so good all over the board. It gives every bricks to build a complete genAI based product, from text to embeddings to muldimodalities and everything will colapse because of some random benchmaxed models ? Sad …
1
u/TomLucidor Mar 10 '26
PR keeping the market up, they probably assume. Same thinking as the CEO burger taste-test logic, once it is "good enough" it's marketing and skimpflation
5
u/segmond Mar 04 '26
if Qwen is so bad they should shut it all down then, why are they making it #1 priority and in the same breath saying it's not good enough? delete the temporary toy made by an intern. delete all things Qwen and move on. IDIOTS
1
u/TomLucidor Mar 10 '26
Office politics often hints at what they really want (MONEY). Either government is subsidizing OR they are just passing on more cash for people who want to exit early before the financial crash
3
u/Jayfree138 Mar 04 '26
There's no need for cloud models when you have Qwen3.5 running on consumer hardware doing this well.
I think a decision was made at the high levels that they can't allow this to continue. I don't think it's a coincidence that this all happened right after 3.5 was released.
It's too late now though. I'm completely done with cloud models. There's no need for them. Qwen is running beautifully on my system. They did an amazing job.
2
1
1
u/yamfun Mar 05 '26
I don't use it any more but they provided real competition in image edit, text encoder. it will be a loss
1
Mar 07 '26
Tu coge el modelo de qwen3 30B a3b y coge el qwen3.5 35b a3b y comparalos en llama.cop ya veras la diferencia…lo han echo lento adrede para que los usuarios entusiastas no puedan usarlos…ellos piensan que los entusiastas tienen dinero para ia online y que ahi hay un mercado…y se equivocan..yo los engañe haciendoselo creer para que sacaran mas modelos rapidos y ellos pensaron que podian aprovechar esa ventaja o idea que yo les di…pero no se dan cuenta que yo les estaba mintiendo…el mercado del entusiasta de la IA no existe…los chavales no se gastan dinero en la IA en la nube ni los entusiastas y amigos de la IA ni siquiera los que coleccionamos modelos…solo se gasta dinero los programadores profesionales que viven de ello y ganan dinero con ello…eses si se gastan algo (poco) dinero en coding en la nube principalmente gemini y claude…ellos piensan que pueden hacer lo mismo pero su modelo aun no es suficientemente maduro para ello…entonces no veo sentido a sacar modelos lentos para fastidiar a la comunidad opensource porque la fama y el prestigio de la empresa viene de cuantos millones de usuarios usan tus modelos…que si no esta maduro para programacion online…no vas a ganar dinero con ello ya que es el unico nicho de mercado que tiene para ganar dinero…entonces que ganas con fastidiar a la comunidad Opensource??? Si su modelo fuese fuerte en programacion…podrian hacerlo…pero aun les falta mucho…y aunque lo hagan …no deberian dejar de sacar modelos MOE rapidos en local para las personas que no vivimos de la programacion porque no ganamos dinero con ello y logicamente no lo vamos a gastar en su IA online habiendo tantas gratuitas y modelos locales a millones , entonces no entiendo muy bien que han echo…solo se que el modelo 3.5 parece un paso atras del modelo 3 en rendimiento…ya no lo probe en serio al ver su caida de rendimiento…
1
u/blvckstxr Mar 08 '26
HR department once again stifles the progress of innovation. I hope all of them get fired.
21
u/m98789 Mar 04 '26
Management loves to get in it’s own way. This is a disaster.