Alibaba Group has formally announced the appointment of AI expert Liu Dayiheng as the new leader of its Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) large language model project. This strategic leadership shift is designed to streamline the team's management framework and define clear management pathways, thereby fostering future technological advancements and business rollouts. Following the departure of the previous technical lead, Lin Junyang, in March of this year, the project was temporarily overseen by Alibaba Cloud's CTO, Zhou Jingren. Meanwhile, Liu Dayiheng assumed responsibility for the training and coding teams. At the Cloud Town Conference, which kicks off tomorrow, Liu Dayiheng will present the latest developments and technical insights regarding the Qwen large model. Currently, he holds the position of Token Foundry Qwen LLM project lead within Alibaba’s ATH Business Group and is listed just below Joe Tsai and Wu Yongming on the conference's roster of speakers. Liu Dayiheng, a PhD candidate at the School of Computing at Sichuan University, is presently a researcher at the DAMO Academy, where he specializes in natural language generation research. He was a top-tier recruit in Huawei's "Genius Youngster Program" and joined Alibaba in 2021. Prior to this appointment, he was in charge of Qwen's pre-training efforts and temporarily managed the post-training and coding teams, reporting directly to Zhou Jingren.