Junyang Lin was the technical lead of Alibaba’s Qwen project. He announced he was stepping down on March 3, 2026. He now lists himself as an independent researcher on his personal site.
In a talk titled ‘Qwen: Towards a Generalist Model / Agent,‘ he walks through the Qwen family. It ends on a single line: “Training models -> training agents.” He later expanded that line into an detailed post as an independent researcher. This article reads the talk and the detailed post together.
What Lin’s Talk Actually Covers
The talk is a tour of the Qwen model family, not a single release. It moves through QwQ-32B, Qwen2.5-Max, Qwen3, Qwen2.5-VL, and Qwen2.5-Omni. Each stop shows benchmark charts against contemporaries. The named baselines include DeepSeek-R1, Grok 3 Beta, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s o-series.
The Qwen3 stop carries the most detail. Lin highlights hybrid thinking modes: a thinking mode for step-by-step reasoning, and a non-thinking mode for near-instant responses. He adds dynamic thinking budgets, so callers can cap how much the model reasons. Qwen3 expanded multilingual support from 29 to 119 languages and dialects.
