Alibaba Group has appointed senior AI researcher Dayiheng Liu as head of its Qwen large language model team, according to employees familiar with the move reported by The Information.
The Qwen family, which includes multiple model sizes released under permissive licences, is one of China’s most prominent open‑source foundation model efforts. It is regarded as one of the most prominent open‑source foundation model efforts from a Chinese technology company.
Leadership of the team had been unclear following organisational changes at Alibaba’s cloud and AI divisions over the past year, according to the editor’s briefing.
The story was reported by Juro Osawa at The Information on 21 September 2026.
The Information has previously reported on Alibaba’s AI restructuring and model release cadence.
The move suggests Alibaba intends to maintain a steady cadence for Qwen releases, which have been a key part of the open‑source AI ecosystem in China.
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