Junyang Lin

A BILLION QWEN DOWNLOADS. THEN THE TECH LEAD WALKED OUT

Lin went from Peking University straight into Alibaba's language-model research and became a technical leader behind Qwen's open-model expansion — chat, coding, long context, multimodal. He resigned in 2026 after the family passed a billion downloads.

1. 2019

   THE LANGUAGE RESEARCHER GOES STRAIGHT FROM PEKING UNIVERSITY TO DAMO

   After graduate study at Peking University, Lin joined Alibaba's DAMO Academy in 2019 and began working inside the company's language-model research organization, the path that later led into Qwen.

   SOURCES: Shanghai Information Officereported · TechCrunchreported

2. Apr 2023

   QWEN GETS ITS OWN TEAM — HE'S ON IT

   Lin joined the Qwen effort in April 2023 as Alibaba organized a dedicated team around its new foundation-model family.

   SOURCES: TechCrunchreported

3. Sep 28, 2023

   QWEN GETS ITS FIRST TECHNICAL REPORT

   Lin was among the authors of the first Qwen technical report covering base, chat, coding and mathematics variants of Alibaba's model family.

   SOURCES: Qwenreported

4. Jul 15, 2024

   QWEN2 EXPANDS THE OPEN MODEL FAMILY

   Lin co-authored the Qwen2 technical report as Alibaba expanded the family across dense and mixture-of-experts model sizes.

   SOURCES: Qwenreported

5. Jan 26, 2025

   THE CONTEXT WINDOW STRETCHES TO A MILLION TOKENS

   Lin co-authored the Qwen2.5-1M report describing a million-token context window and open inference techniques.

   SOURCES: Qwenreported

6. Mar 4, 2026

   THE QWEN TECH LEAD WALKS OUT

   Lin resigned from Alibaba's Qwen organization after helping lead a model family that Reuters said had surpassed one billion downloads across hundreds of open releases.

   SOURCES: Reutersreported