Something is afoot in the land of Qwen

Alibaba's Qwen team is experiencing significant upheaval, with lead researcher Junyang Lin and several other core members announcing their resignations. The departures appear linked to an internal reorganization where a new researcher from Google's Gemini team was placed in charge of Qwen. Alibaba's CEO held an emergency all-hands meeting, signaling the company recognizes the gravity of the situation. This comes at a particularly unfortunate time as the Qwen 3.5 model family—ranging from a massive 397B MoE model down to a 2B multimodal reasoning model—has been receiving strong praise for delivering high quality results at small sizes.