Alibaba’s world-leading AI lab becomes a target for talent poaching by Chinese rivals

Recent departures include Yan Zhijie and Bo Liefeng, two senior figures at Tongyi Lab, developer of the Qwen AI models

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Alibaba has become a hunting ground for AI talent in China. Photo: Reuters

Published: 10:00am, 10 Aug 2025

Top artificial intelligence talent at Alibaba Group Holding’s Tongyi Lab, developer of the widely used open-source Qwen models, has become highly sought after, with a number of leading experts leaving to join rival tech giants amid a heated recruitment race.

Recent departures include Yan Zhijie and Bo Liefeng, two senior figures at Tongyi. Yan, who joined Alibaba in 2015, was an early member of the company’s cutting-edge Damo Academy and later led Tongyi’s speech lab.

He left Alibaba in February and recently joined JD.com’s Explore Academy, a research division founded in 2020 to focus on frontier technology, Chinese media reported.

JD.com did not directly comment on Yan’s recruitment, but said on Monday that “Explore Academy is proceeding as planned, actively recruiting top AI talent from across the industry, including technical experts and members of our Tech Genius Team”.

Following his departure from Alibaba, Yan briefly joined Tencent Holdings, but left soon after an internal restructuring, according to Chinese media reports. Li Xiangang, co-founder of start-up 01.AI, took his place In June.

Tencent’s booth at World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July. Photo: Wency Chen

Separately, Bo, who headed Tongyi’s applied vision division after previous roles at JD.com and Amazon.com, recently transitioned to Tencent’s Hunyuan AI model team, Chinese media reported.

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