Alibaba names ex-Huawei 'genius youth' Liu Daheng as new head of Qwen LLM team
量子位 · wechat · 2026-09-22
Six months after Junyang Lin's departure, Alibaba has named Liu Daheng — once a top-tier Huawei 'Genius Youth' hire with a 2 million yuan salary — as head of the Qwen LLM project under the TokenFoundry business unit.
Liu is a Qwen founding-era member: he joined DAMO Academy in 2021 to lead early pretraining, drove Qwen1 through Qwen3.5 and Qwen-Math, and contributed to 300+ open-source Qwen models. He has 60,000+ citations and co-authored a NeurIPS 2025 best paper with Junyang Lin as the other corresponding author.
The handover was gradual: after Lin stepped down in March, Zhou Jingren held interim control while Liu ran post-training and coding teams; in June Alibaba formed TokenFoundry under CEO Wu Yongming. Qwen3.8-Max now ranks 7th on Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index, and Liu's Yunqi talk — 'Qwen: Toward Real-World Agents' — signals the roadmap ahead.
Related event: Liu Dayiheng Named New Qwen Lead; Qwen4 Expected at Cloud Summit(2 posts)→
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