Something is afoot in the land of Qwen

I'm behind on writing about Qwen 3.5, a truly remarkable family of open weight models released by Alibaba's Qwen team over the past few weeks. I'm hoping that the 3.5 family doesn't turn out to be Qwen's swan song, seeing as that team has had some very high profile departures in the past 24 hours. It all started with this tweet from Junyang Lin: me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen. Junyang Lin was the lead researcher building Qwen, and was key to releasing their open weight models from 2024 onwards.