Alibaba Appoints New Head of Qwen LLM Team

Alibaba Group has appointed Dayiheng Liu, one of its senior AI researchers, as the head of its Qwen large language models, according to two employees with knowledge of the matter.

Liu’s appointment has brought more clarity to the Qwen team’s leadership after multiple rounds of reorganization earlier this year, according to the people. Alibaba’s official website for its annual Apsara tech conference, which starts on Tuesday, prominently features a photo of Liu right after Chair Joe Tsai and CEO Eddie Wu among executives who will be speaking at the event. The website lists Liu’s title as “Head of Qwen LLM Project.”

Liu, who got his doctorate in 2020 in computer science from Sichuan University, joined Alibaba in 2021. Since then, he has been one of the core contributors to Qwen models. Over the past few years, Alibaba has established itself as one of the global leaders in open-source models. A recently updated version of the company’s most advanced model, Qwen3.8 Max, is currently ranked seventh on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, only behind flagship models from Anthropic and OpenAI as well as Meta Platforms’ most recent Muse Spark 1.3.

Alibaba’s Qwen team has been through major changes over the past six months. In March, Junyang Lin, the team’s tech lead and a key architect of Qwen models, resigned and later started his own AI startup. Then in June, senior executive Jingren Zhou, who was overseeing AI model development, stepped down from that role and became Alibaba’s chief scientist to focus on long-term research..