qwen started as the core team of Tongyi dept, which was part of the algorithm & model offerings from Alibaba-Cloud (aliyun)
- 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.
Definitely plenty of people further up the corporate ladder were not happy with the success, while the top is likely too far disconnected to understand.
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.
Maybe, maybe not. It's not even clear if there's gonna be a new qwen, and if they'll keep open sourcing it. It also depends on what the team coming from gemini brings to the table. People move around, and things get shared. Happened before with grok, will likely happen with qwen. Everyone wants what the OG teams have.
Mistral was ex llama people. And after their good start, they've kinda plateaued lately. Their latest open models have been quite disappointing. Nothing revolutionary at any rate.
People said about the gemini team that moved to xai that they were "amateurs". And yet they delivered in about 1 year with grok4, was SotA for a few weeks at launch. They now lost some people, and likely will get others.
Round and round the people move around, and everyone gets most of the things that everyone else uses. I have no doubt that the qwen team will get to find a cozy place to call home for a while...
'People said about the gemini team that moved to xai that they were "amateurs". And yet they delivered in about 1 year with grok4, was SotA for a few weeks'
Qwen3.5 27b is frontier intelligence density.
GPT 20b high used to be top; and only barely inches out 35b.
glm 4.7 flash strong 4th place.
nemotron 30b 4th place.
Its very interesting that GLM 5 didnt manage to get the same density as they were able to with 4.7 flash.
We love to elect chest-beating leaders.
Corporate structures are sort of sociopathic by default. Theres no empathy globule on the corporate hierarchy and everyone is motivated to put the corporations interests first.
This isnt even a criticism really, its just the reality. Corporations are like, paperclip maximising AI's, but for shareholder profit.
The only people he attracts are h1b candidates who have limited choices