qwen started as the core team of Tongyi dept, which was part of the algorithm & model offerings from Alibaba-Cloud (aliyun)

https://tongyi.aliyun.com/

- qwen series for nlp/LLM

- wan series for cv/video

- fun series for ASR and TTS

- icss for AI customer service

- lingma for coding

- xingchen for metaverse hype

- tingwu for podcast/notebooklm

Now that's the awkward part: qwen was too successful, a team had more influence than Tongyi and even Aliyun, obviously they started to develop multi-modal capabilities overlapping other team's work, even with their own app, very vertical integrated.

But qwen didn't contribute much revenue or DAU/MAU except fame amoung AI communities. Since GPUs were scarce, Alibaba had to balance free open weight models and customer use.

In a better world, alibaba might just as well split qwen into an independent entity and IPO it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47236390

Which is insane. Obviously he isnt the only lead at alibaba, but qwen as consequence lost many talented people by doing this. It will negatively impact the Qwen team.

Qwen4 is going to flop like Lllama 4.

I hope those who just quit form their own new lab and start building again.