Alibaba Qwen's central technical leader Junyang Lin just announced he is stepping down from the open-weight project, only a day after releasing the Qwen 3.5 small models. Colleagues called the abrupt exit an immense loss, with one teammate hinting the departure wasn't Lin's choice. The shakeup comes right as China's top open-source model family gains global momentum.
Alibaba's Qwen team just launched the Qwen3.5 Small Model Series, offering four compact sizes from 0.8B to 9B parameters along with base checkpoints. Built with native multimodal architecture and scaled reinforcement learning, the lineup aims to deliver snappy intelligence directly on edge devices and local agents.
Alibaba just dropped its Qwen 3.5 Medium series, featuring four models including Qwen3.5-Flash, 35B-A3B, 122B-A10B, and 27B. The team claims the 35B-A3B model outperforms the previous-generation 235B giant, proving architecture and RL can beat raw parameter scale. The Flash version also brings a default 1M context window and built-in agent tooling.
ByteDance and Alibaba are reportedly prepping next-generation flagship models for release during the February Lunar New Year holiday. ByteDance is lining up Doubao 2.0 alongside major image and video upgrades, while Alibaba is readying Qwen 3.5 with targeted reasoning boosts. With DeepSeek V4 also rumored for mid-February, China's frontier AI race is entering an intense new clash.
