Alibaba Group appointed senior AI researcher Dayiheng Liu to lead its Qwen large language model project. This appointment establishes a defined management structure for the company's primary AI initiative.
The move follows several organizational restructures and high-profile departures in early 2026. Technical lead Lin Junyang was among the senior staff who recently resigned from the team.
Liu joined Alibaba in 2021 as a core member of the Qwen development team. Alibaba confirmed his new role on the speaker list for its annual Cloud Summit.