Alibaba's Qwen AI Division Head Resigns; New 'Alibaba Token Hub' Formed

Alibaba's Qwen AI division head has resigned, prompting the creation of a new 'Alibaba Token Hub' to centralize the company's AI efforts. Qwen, developed by Alibaba Cloud, is a family of large language models first launched in April 2023. It includes recent releases like Qwen3.6-Max-Preview (April 2026) and Qwen2.5-Omni-7B (March 2025), which accepts text, images, video, and audio inputs for real-time voice chatting. The models are distributed under various licenses, including Apache 2.0, and have been downloaded over 40 million times.

The resignation and restructuring aim to streamline Alibaba's AI development amid fierce competition from rivals like DeepSeek and Baidu. Qwen's models, such as the Qwen2.5-VL series with up to 72 billion parameters, excel in visual language tasks, while Qwen2-Math targets mathematical reasoning. The new Token Hub is expected to focus on integrating these capabilities into Alibaba's ecosystem, including its e-commerce platform via the Accio application, which automates data collection and trend tracking for business customers.