Alibaba Group has appointed Liu Daheng, a senior AI researcher, as the new leader of its Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen) large language model team, according to two employees familiar with the matter. Sources indicate that Liu's appointment brings clearer management structure to the Qwen team following multiple organizational reshuffles this year.

The company's annual Apsara Conference kicks off Tuesday, and Liu's photo appears prominently on the event's speaker lineup page, positioned right after Chairman Joe Tsai and CEO Eddie Wu, with his title listed as "Head of the Qwen Large Model Project."

Liu earned his PhD in computer science from Sichuan University in 2020 and joined Alibaba in 2021, where he has since been a key developer of the Qwen series of models. Over the past few years, Alibaba has risen to become one of the leading players in the global open-source large model space. Its latest flagship upgrade, Qwen 3.8 Max, currently ranks seventh on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, trailing only the flagship models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta's newest Muse Spark 1.3.

The Qwen team at Alibaba has seen several personnel changes over the past six months. In March, Lin Junyang, the team's technical head and chief architect of Qwen, departed to launch his own AI startup. In June, Zhou Jingren, the executive previously overseeing large model R&D, stepped down from that role to become Alibaba's chief scientist, focusing on long-term frontier research.