big corp politics.

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.

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dworks an hour 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).

	▲	storus an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Happening to Skoda in Volkswagen - German managers were first forcing Skoda to have dumb design to not threaten VW/Audi, that didn't work, Skoda became the only profitable part of VW, now they are imposing 25% cost reduction at Skoda as well as the company "must save money", despite generating all the profit.

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dust42 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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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cc-d 2 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Hello EST, I saw your a rap video yesterday, you should link it here it was pretty good