ChinaApple’s iPhone AI in China is Alibaba’s Qwen.
Hugging Face counted 2 billion Qwen downloads in 2026’s first seven months, ahead of Google and Meta.
Beta testing began 4 November, with Qwen in selected Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence features.
Qwen’s post-training chief Bowen Yu and researcher Binyuan Hui have also left this year.
Alibaba has not said why technical leader Junyang Lin quit in March.
How each outlet framed it
- TechNode leans favorable
- traces Qwen's path to Apple through internal Alibaba resistance, Llama holdouts and Fliggy's DeepSeek R1 experiments before its rise
Sources: TechNode