Alibaba Names Liu Daheng Qwen Lead After Junyang Lin Exit; Qwen4 May Debut at Cloud Summit
智东西 · wechat · 2026-09-21
Ahead of Alibaba's 2026 Apsara Conference, senior AI researcher Liu Daheng has been publicly confirmed as head of the Qwen LLM project under the ATH business group's TokenFoundry unit—the first named Qwen lead since Junyang Lin's departure in March. Liu previously led Qwen pretraining and co-managed post-training and coding teams; CEO Wu Yongming now directly oversees ATH, while Zhou Jingren moved to chief scientist leading an AI future research institute.
Key takeaways:
- Qwen4 likely imminent: August's open-source Qwen3.8-Flash-Next was labeled an early architectural preview of Qwen4, and the summit's Qwen forum promises first reveals.
- Agent pivot: Alibaba Cloud will showcase agent-oriented upgrades across servers, storage, networking, and databases, launching AgentStudio for enterprise agent development and hardware.
- Silicon: T-Head will debut its full-stack datacenter compute/storage/networking chip lineup, while Bailian upgrades its token infrastructure.
Related event: Liu Dayiheng Named New Qwen Lead; Qwen4 Expected at Cloud Summit(2 posts)→
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