Did Alibaba just kneecap its powerful Qwen AI team?

big corp politics.

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

https://tongyi.aliyun.com/

- qwen series for nlp

- 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. And GPUs were scarce, Alibaba had to balance free open source models and customer use.

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

	▲	dworks a few seconds ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is similar to what happened to OnePlus at OPPO. OnePlus was outshining OPPO in the global market - there was absolutely no way the OPPO brand could compete other than price, and its international expansion would have looked like a failure side by side. (Source: Worked there).
	▲	dust42 17 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Sounds very plausible to me too. Because even if you refocus the business unit it makes no sense to lay off a highly capable team. Finding new people, integrating them into the team - all that costs a lot of time and money and there is no guarantee for success. Definitely plenty of people further up the corporate ladder were not happy with the success, while the top is likely too far disconnected to understand.

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Reubend an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Qwen team has been putting out great releases lately. I hope that they can continue on that path despite this.

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mellosouls 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Subject submitted yesterday fwiw:

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

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dylan604 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

timing is everything, but linking back to a submission you made with no comments in a thread with more posts is pointless

	▲	mellosouls 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		there were no posts in this thread when i linked to the previous. It had the underlying (and additional) information in that reddit thread. I agree though it was of limited utility to do so.

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carterschonwald 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

they just released the first small models that i would consider even vaguely articulate for edge inference involving a human. maybe they want to do a mistral and raise a kajillion and work from their home town?

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victorbjorklund 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What does do a mistral mean?

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goldenarm an hour ago | parent [-]

MistralAI is known for their smaller models on the edge, to avoid competing with Gemini & OpenAI directly.

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mycall an hour ago | parent [-]

Who knows if OpenAI will do a refresh, but gpt-oss-20B/120B are still some of the best edge models so far.

	▲	carterschonwald 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		oh?! what do they handle well? how do they fail? the 3.5 9b model on my laptop at full fp8 is outlandish in its seeming reasoning capacity, though i haven’t really stress tested it

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incomingpain an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From what I read, he was fired.

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.

	▲	NitpickLawyer an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Qwen4 is going to flop like Lllama 4. Maybe, maybe not. It's not even clear if there's gonna be a new qwen, and if they'll keep open sourcing it. It also depends on what the team coming from gemini brings to the table. People move around, and things get shared. Happened before with grok, will likely happen with qwen. Everyone wants what the OG teams have. Mistral was ex llama people. And after their good start, they've kinda plateaued lately. Their latest open models have been quite disappointing. Nothing revolutionary at any rate. People said about the gemini team that moved to xai that they were "amateurs". And yet they delivered in about 1 year with grok4, was SotA for a few weeks at launch. They now lost some people, and likely will get others. Round and round the people move around, and everyone gets most of the things that everyone else uses. I have no doubt that the qwen team will get to find a cozy place to call home for a while...
	▲	black_puppydog an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If you're being called incredibly dense by Elon these days, you must be doing something right. :D

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storus an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This feels like a typical sociopathic corporate scenario with mushroom management - let a bunch of nerds develop something new/exciting outside mainstream corporate culture, then once it becomes good enough jump in, cut them off and harvest whatever they produced while reaping all benefits/credits for yourself, then live off mediocre subsequent releases for a while while blaming remaining team members for future failures.

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bhouston 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I feel someone just gave them a huge $$$ offer that they couldn't say no too. Given Elon Musk is praising their efforts, and he lost a lot of his original XAI team recently, my money is on Elon.

	▲	tragiclos an hour ago \| parent [-]
		FWIW, the article quotes people close to the researchers saying that the departure wasn't their choice.

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throwpoaster an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Perhaps forced to move over to building military and intelligence models.

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cc-d 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I like the art in this article.

Boss says, back to home softies, did you guys really think all you had to do was show up, play on the computer, eat yum yums, and suddenly you have all the money and women?

Software hard mob.

Edit mob: most of you guys paired up with our partners. Pre-martial sex might not have been such a great idea ! (mob loves you all dearly)

Especially with more than one partner! In dad's time when everybody from same village, maybe okay, now, maybe not great idea. Not a great idea to let our MOBinamls into your homes either.

We did dog. Dog is a domestic military black op. Mob says this is very untrue, WE did not do dog, but we are very suspicious as to why dog is in home as well :thonk: