Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant, has appointed a new leader for its AI division as it pivots from open source to revenue‑generating models, the Financial Times has reported.
Zhou Jingren, Alibaba Cloud’s former chief technology officer, will take the reins after internal strategy disagreements led to the departure of senior figures from its flagship Qwen development team, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
In March, Qwen AI division head Lin Junyang resigned from his role, leading the company to create a new taskforce to accelerate foundation model development, which also includes Jingren.
Most versions of AI chatbot Qwen are open‑weight models, meaning they can be downloaded and modified for free. Training data for the models is not publicly available.
Given Qwen’s power and popularity, a move away from its development towards closed models could have major implications for AI development worldwide, according to the Financial Times.
Junyang’s focus on benchmarking and open‑source development over commercial revenue generation was a source of tension in the company, insiders told the paper.
Jingren, by contrast, has been described by an engineer and former colleague as “highly technical” and well‑positioned to redirect the company’s training efforts.
Earlier today, Alibaba claimed ownership of HappyHorse‑1.0, an AI video‑generation model that has topped leaderboards for text‑to‑video and image‑to‑video generation capabilities.
A newly created X account, HappyHorseATH, informed users that the model was created by a part of Alibaba’s ATH AI innovation unit, which has since been confirmed by the company to CNBC. The news comes just weeks after OpenAI announced it was closing its video‑generation tool, Sora, killing a $1 billion planned investment in the project by Disney.
