qwen

The head of AI at Alibaba leaves the company. That points to a 180º turn for the Qwen family models

by

An employee leaving a company does not have to mean a radical change, especially when that employee has been the leader of an important project and his departure occurs just after the launch. This is what just happened with Junyang (Justin) Lin, the technological leader of the team qwen. A strange exit. On March 2, Alibaba launched a new model family lightweight with two fast models designed for edge use, a multimodal model for agentic systems and a reasoning model that stood up to much larger models. The next day, Junyang Lin announced on his X account “I am leaving. Goodbye, my dear Qwen,” without giving further details. And he wasn’t the only one. Also leaving the company were Hui Binyuan, a scientific researcher, and Yu Bowen, head of post-training at Qwen. No one has commented on the reasons behind his departure from the company and rumors that they had been fired They didn’t wait. However, according to Panda Daily, Alibaba said it had approved his resignation. ¿What is happening? Justin’s departure caused a stir among his colleagues, with some claiming that it was “the end of an era”. We are talking about the person who has led the Qwen team from the beginning and a great AI researcher, with an academic profile that exceeds 40,000 citationsso this decision has raised many eyebrows. Whether fired or resigned, Justin was a key figure on the team, but he also leaves just after a launch and several other employees have followed him. What is happening at Alibaba? Closed models. As we said, the parties involved have not offered more details, but the theories have not been long in coming and one of them is that Alibaba could be thinking of moving towards closed models. Alibaba has been making efforts to monetize its AI and closing their models could be part of the plan. It would certainly make sense for the project leader to quit at the prospect of such a profound change. There’s a new guy in the office. Shortly after the news broke, another one jumped out: Alibaba has signed Zhou Haowho until now was a researcher at Google DeepMind. Zhou will join the Qwen team as head of post-training, so he will directly replace Yu Bowen and not Justin. Zhou has been a key figure in the development of Gemini 3, the Seeker’s AI mode, and Deep Research mode. lto open source strategy. DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen… Chinese companies have become the standard bearers of open source AI, an antagonistic strategy with the closed stance of the US. But it is not a question of giving away AI just for the sake of it, but rather it is part of their roadmap: offering access to create a large user base and thus be able to be dominant in the future. Furthermore, Chinese companies know very well that the US is technologically ahead (Justin himself recognized it recently), so launching open and free AIs is a way to gain ground on them. However, in the long term it does not seem like a very good strategy because there will come a point where they want to monetize it and there is a risk of losing users who feel betrayed. We do not know if Alibaba has already started down this path, but if it has, we will soon see if this risk is real or not. Image | qwen In Xataka | China’s open AIs aren’t “beating” ChatGPT, they’re doing something more important: catapulting their industry

Qwen and open models

by

Alibaba’s Qwen family of open AI models is quietly taking the world by storm. Until the current month of January these models have overcome and to 700 million downloads on the Hugging Face platform. The milestone is significant and confirms the supremacy of Chinese companies in this type of models. what has happened. Those responsible for the development of this family of models explain how Hugging Face data They don’t lie: these projects have become the most popular open models worldwide, at least if we look at the number of downloads. Unstoppable. In October 2025 the Qwen model family managed to surpass the previous leader in this segment, the Llama de Meta family of models. Two months later, the Qwen models had been downloaded so much that the total number exceeded the combined figure of the eight AI models next in popularity. That group is made up of the models from Meta, DeepSeek, OpenAI, Mistral, NVIDIA, Zhipu.ai, Moonshot and Minimax. Alibaba is a steamroller. Since Qwen launched in 2023, the advancement of the models in this family has been unstoppable. Although initially accessing them was more uncomfortableAlibaba has taken advantage of its infrastructure and its size to popularize them little by little, but above all its engineers have done something else: not stop launching models. The pace has been frenetic, but the models are also notable and comparable to proprietary models from major US technology companies. Qwen wants to be the Android of AI. The family’s model catalog is enormous. Hugging Face currently includes 300 different models that cover both slightly older versions and various variants of each new major version. For example, we have models specialized in visual data recognition (Qwen VL), in programming (Qwen Coder) or models in image generation (Qwen Image Edit) or “generic” models absolutely gigantic or others like Omni that already compete with Grok 4 or GPT 5 Pro. The intention is obvious: to be the “standard” AI models on the market. Even if it is due to saturation. Surprise: the most popular is not the most powerful. a study Published in October, it did provide surprising information on the growth in popularity of this family of models. One would expect that the most downloaded would be some of the versions of Qwen 3, the most modern and capable version. Actually the most downloaded is Qwen 2.5-1.5B-Instruct, a “light” model that can even run on modest mobile phones and laptops. Tiny but bully. Currently the Hugging Face list indicates that the most popular in downloads is Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, more modern and somewhat less lightweight, but still “small” by today’s standards. It seems clear that there is notable interest in being able to run this model on mobile phones, tablets and computers with little video memory. Thousands of derived projects. The possibility of obtaining and using these open models in a simple way has made many developers and companies take advantage of them to customize them and adapt them to their own needs. That has made according to Xinhua That family has been used in more than 180,000 derived versions. Flame fades. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley confirms that its vision is different. Goal, what led this area initially thanks to Llama, has given a rudder stroke. The company is still expected to launch new versions of this model, but in the meantime most technology giants focus on their closed and proprietary models. Of course: they keep some models open with a promising future, as we have seen with Gemma (Google) Phi (Microsoft) or gpt-oss (OpenAI). Without forgetting that Mistral is a great European benchmark and also offers open variants. In Xataka | China and the United States have started an antagonistic race in AI through a simple question: whether to be open source or not

While OpenAI takes all the media glory with ChatGPT, Alibaba is already taking important clients with Qwen. The latest: Airbnb

by

Alibaba has been investing in its family of open language models for quite some time.qwen‘, which are gaining increasing acceptance between developers and users. Although OpenAI takes all the media glory with ChatGPT and the rest of the services, the Chinese firm is not short and already is overtaking him with some clients. The latest example: Airbnb, which has chosen to rely mostly on Alibaba’s Qwen AI model for its automated customer service, leaving ChatGPT in a secondary role. Airbnb’s decision. Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of the tourist accommodation platform, explained Bloomberg this week that his company “heavily relies” on Alibaba’s Qwen model. As he admitted to the outlet, ChatGPT’s integration capabilities “are not quite ready” for Airbnb’s needs. On the other hand, Chesky assured that Qwen is “very good, fast and cheap.” It is curious, especially considering that Chesky is a personal friend of Sam Altman, head of OpenAI. How the system works. Airbnb’s customer service agent, which the company deployed to all its users Americans in English last May, is built on 13 different AI models, including those from OpenAI, Google and open source providers. However, Chesky recognized that, although they use the latest OpenAI models, “we usually don’t use them much in production because there are faster and cheaper models.” Just like point the company, the system has allowed them to cut their human workforce by 15% and claims to have saved average resolution time, going from almost three hours to just six seconds. Open source is gaining ground. Open source models, which developers can modify as they wish, are increasingly challenging closed systems like those from OpenAI. Although the company also has an open model (gpt-oss), Chinese tech companies are releasing models much faster, more cost-effectively, and open source. Joe Tsai, president of Alibaba, declared recently that the winner in AI should be determined by “who can adopt it the fastest,” not “who creates the most powerful model.” A future integration with ChatGPT in the air. Although Airbnb is awaiting the development of ChatGPT app integrations and could consider a collaboration in the future, similar to those of its competitors Booking and Expedia, the platform is not currently among the first applications available on the OpenAI chatbot. Chesky even advised to OpenAI about its new ability for third-party developers to integrate their applications into ChatGPT, a feature that the company announced this month and which he described as a “developer preview.” And now what. Airbnb plans expand its AI agent with support in Spanish and French this fall, and 56 more languages ​​next year. Meanwhile, the company claims to be betting on new social functions to foster connections between users and improve travel recommendations within the application. For Chesky, these features are “probably the most differentiated part of Airbnb.” Cover image | Unsplash (Oberon Copeland), Wikimedia In Xataka | OpenAI is no longer a startup. Now it is a black hole of 500,000 million that threatens the world economy

Alibaba is becoming the Ai Open Source sponator. Your family of Qwen models is putting the market above

by

The Chinese giant Alibaba has launched Officially QWEN3-OMNI, an open source artificial intelligence model that can process text, images, audio and video simultaneously. In fact, it is the first model that unifies these four modalities natively and does it completely free, something that none of its US competitors offers. Bet on the Free Code. While Openai and Google charge for using their most advanced multimodal models, Alibaba gives theirs under Apache 2.0 license. This means that any company can download it, modify it and use it commercially without any cost. This open source approach It is the trend that multiple Asian giants are adopting to cause global interest in their language models and that multiple developers around the world want to contribute to their evolution. It is part of China’s strategy to remain relevant in the AI ​​career. Image: Alibaba What can you do exactly. As points The company, QWEN3-OMNI simultaneously processes text in 119 languages, recognizes voice in 19 languages ​​and can speak in 10 different languages. Its “thinker-speaker” architecture separates the reasoning of the audio generation, promising real-time responses with latencies of just 234 milliseconds for audio and 547 milliseconds for video. Benchmarks. In 36 reference tests, QWEN3-OMNI exceeds open source models in 32 of them and establishes new general records in 22. In advanced mathematics (Aime25) obtains 65 points compared to 26.7 of GPT-4O. In writing tasks (Writingbench) 82.6 points, exceeding 75.5 GPT-4O points. While it is true that it is not being compared to Openai’s most avant-garde model to date (GPT-5), it is a real achievement what giants like Alibaba are doing with their free and open source models. Strategy. Alibaba is running a risky but intelligent play: democratize the multimodal AI to gain market share. “This could bring some changes to the panorama of the OMNI open source models,” explained The Qwen team. The announcement occurs just when Nvidia announces Investments of 100,000 million dollars in data centers for OpenAI, while Alibaba and the rest of Asian giants prefer to dispute technological leadership in AI from another angle. What does it mean. Great American technology have opted for proprietary models that generate direct income. Alibaba wants to change the rules by giving instant access to its technology to millions of developers. Even if they offer it for free, they are building an ecosystem that gives them competitive advantage In the long term. And now what. China is not the only one that launches free code models. OpenAi has GPT-Oss And Google has Gemma. Two options that developers have on hand to deploy their ideas, modify them, contribute to their evolution and others, although they are not the main approach of both companies. In the case of Alibaba models, Deepseek either Tencentthe idea does revolve around the open source, and the pulse does not tremble when offering their most powerful models for free (despite the fact that some more complete and specific options are reserved for special agreements). QWEN models A great reputation have been carved Throughout these last years, and this new evolution in his family marks a new ribbon for the rest of the companies, not only in efficiency, but in the deployment of this business model. Cover image | Alibaba and Growika In Xataka | Eight people. An hour of work. A budget dollar. 5,000 new podcasts thanks to AI

Apple Intelligence needed a Chinese partner and has already found it, according to ‘The Information’. The key is qwen

by

Apple needs a local partner to offer Apple Intelligence in China, where regulations demand that AI services pass through national companies. We knew that Apple had been looking for the ideal partner for some time, according to The Informationhe has found it in Alibaba. Why is it important. The absence of Apple Intelligence in China has weighed iPhone sales in the largest smartphones market in the world. The agreement could reverse this trend just when Apple plans to launch its AI in simplified Chinese in April, the same month in which It will arrive in Spanish. In Xataka Apple’s metamorphosis: from the minimalist catalog to calculated maximalism What has happened. Apple and Alibaba have jointly presented their AI functions for approval by the Chinese regulator. The alliance comes after Apple will rule out collaborating with Baidu for not reaching the required standards. Between bambalins. Apple was also probing possible alliances with Bytedance, Tencent and Deepseek Before opting for Alibaba. The choice was based on the robustness of the model Qwen from Alibaba and its ability to process personalized data thanks to its experience in electronic commerce. Also, Ahem, in Your alignment with socialist values required by the Beijing government. The latest. Alibaba’s actions They have triggered 3.5% After the publication of the news and accumulates 8% in two days. The market trusts the fruit of this operation between both companies. Alibaba’s Qwen model has gained reputation in recent months. Its potential was demonstrated when Stanford scientists managed to train a new reasoning model for less than $ 50 using Qwen as a base. S1 marked a before and after for the model. Outstanding image | Xataka with Midjourney In Xataka | Choose between security and survival: the dilemma that terrifies the CEO of Anthropic in the US and China AI war

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.