In September 2026, a series of personnel and business updates emerged from several leading Chinese large language model (LLM) companies. A notable trend emerged: a cohort of post-90s tech professionals swiftly rose to key leadership roles, challenging the industry’s conventional seniority-driven promotion system.

Among these rising stars, Liu Dayiheng of Alibaba is at the helm of Qwen’s foundational LLM development, while Chen Yusen spearheads the commercialization efforts for Qianwen, an LLM tailored for office applications. Luo Fuli from Xiaomi has climbed to the pinnacle of the company’s leadership, guiding her team in developing the MiMo-V2.6-Pro model—a standout performer that claimed the top spot among global open-source weighted models. Meanwhile, Zhou Chang, who transitioned from Alibaba to ByteDance, oversees multimodal generation and world model initiatives, with his team’s Seedance 2.0 model bolstering ByteDance’s footprint in multimodal operations. Yao Shunyu of Tencent manages both the LLM and AI infrastructure divisions, introducing the mid-sized Hy3 model, which achieved notable performance breakthroughs and drove significant growth in user engagement and processing capacity for related products.

Despite having completed their leadership transitions, these post-90s managers now confront a new set of challenges: advancing foundational model capabilities, executing effective commercialization strategies, ensuring the long-term viability of technological paradigms, and achieving full-stack operational capabilities. For them, the real industry trials are only just beginning.