Qwen team @ Alibaba (通义千问 / 通义实验室)
Known for: Alibaba Cloud's open model family, Bailian MaaS layer, coding/agent benchmarks, and developer distribution.
Tongyi Lab established end of 2022 by merging DAMO language/vision/AI teams into Alibaba Cloud. 36Kr and TMTPost frame Qwen as Alibaba's model layer for cloud AI revenue, Bailian MaaS, open-source distribution, and agent/coding benchmarks; Qwen itself has no standalone valuation or P&L.
- WANG Guoyin (王国胤)(former) Co-founder & Head of Post-Training, 01.AI — now leading Alibaba Tongyi Qwen Pilot group
- ZHOU Jingren (周靖人)CTO Alibaba Cloud Intelligence; head of Tongyi Lab; Deputy Head of DAMO; Chief AI Architect
- HUANG Fei (黄飞)Chief Scientist & Senior Director, Language Technologies Lab, DAMO Academy
- ZHOU Hao (周浩)New Qwen tech lead (March 2026), replacing Lin Junyang
- BAI Shuai (白帅)Lead author Qwen3-VL; head of Qwen vision-language line
- AN YangLead author Qwen3 Technical Report; pre-training lead
Models & API pricing
Rates are OpenRouter's listed prices (USD per 1M tokens), a convenient cross-provider benchmark. First-party / native API pricing in China can differ, sometimes materially. Source: OpenRouter, as of Aug 16, 2026. Compare them on the models page.
News & coverage
Notable recent updates, newest first.
Qwen (Chinese: 通义千问) team's Qianwen Office launches with support for Zhipu AI (Chinese: 智谱AI; also known as Z.ai).3 and DeepSeek (Chinese: 深度求索) V4 Pro models.
Alibaba reportedly partners with Apple to co-train AI models.
Qwen (Chinese: 通义千问) launches professional membership pricing at 19-128 yuan/month and video generation fees, becoming the second major Chinese AI app to monetize after Doubao (Chinese: 豆包).
Qwen3.8-Max enters global blind test top 6 with an ELO score of 1497.
Apple's support docs confirm Qwen (Chinese: Qwen) powers Apple Intelligence in China.
Alibaba's Qianwen launches an enterprise agent platform targeting office workflows.
Alibaba Cloud leads a 100M+ RMB Series A in AI ops startup Beilianzhuguan, founded by former Alibaba P10 engineer Lin Hao.
Alibaba's Qwen (Chinese: 通义千问) team launches Qoder Mobile, an AI agent management app for iOS, Android, and HarmonyOS.
Qwen (Chinese: Qwen) tops NVIDIA's list with its Qwen3.8 model.
Qwen (Chinese: Qwen) launches Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS, a speech synthesis model ranked first on Artificial Analysis.