Alibaba Group Holding appointed senior AI researcher Dayiheng Liu as head of its Qwen large language model project, filling a leadership role that had been vacant for more than half a year following successive departures of technical leads and senior executives1,2,3.
The appointment, reported on September 21, places Dayiheng Liu at the top of one of the most widely deployed open-weight model families outside the United States. On the guest list for the Alibaba Cloud Apsara Conference, his photo appears directly after Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai and CEO Wu Yongming.
A turbulent first half
The Qwen project has cycled through leadership changes throughout 2026. Technical lead Lin Junyang posted a farewell message on X on March 4, a departure later confirmed by CEO Wu Yongming in an internal email. Zhou Jingren continued to lead the Tongyi Lab after Lin Junyang left, but stepped down from large-model R&D in June and moved to the role of Group Chief Scientist. Five months after his departure, Lin Junyang resurfaced as the founder of Pragmatik Labs, which has received investment from Tencent.
Dayiheng Liu completed his bachelor's and doctoral degrees in computer science at Sichuan University and was selected into Huawei's "Genius Young" program in 2020, according to 36Kr. He joined the Language Technology Lab of Alibaba DAMO Academy in 2021 and has been a core member of Qwen since its early stage, long overseeing pre-training work.
Apsara Conference timing
The appointment lands on the eve of the 2026 Alibaba Cloud Apsara Conference, held in Hangzhou from September 22 to 24 under the theme "AI for Practical Use," with a core focus on agentic AI. A Citi pre-conference research report indicated that Qwen v3.8 updates, new v3.9 and v4.0 versions, T-Head chip upgrades, and enhanced enterprise agent applications may all be released during the three-day event.
Qwen 3.8 Max currently ranks seventh on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. The Qwen team open-sourced Qwen-Image-2.1 on September 20, a unified text-to-image generation and editing model[1].
ANALYSIS Elevating Dayiheng Liu's profile at Alibaba's flagship conference, positioned immediately after the company's two most senior executives, is a deliberate effort to project stability after a period in which the Qwen project lost both its technical lead and its lab director within three months.