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Alibaba Names Former Huawei 'Genius Youth' Liu Dayiheng to Lead Qwen LLM Team

Alibaba has appointed Liu Dayiheng, a former Huawei 'Genius Youth' recruit and longtime Qwen pre-training lead, as head of its Qwen LLM team, succeeding Lin Junyang about six months after his departure. He outlined a push toward real-world agents in a 15-minute keynote at the Yunqi Conference.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-23 18:10

Liu's name was placed prominently on the guest list for the Alibaba Yunqi Conference, listed after Joe Tsai and Eddie Wu with the title of head of the Qwen LLM project at the Alibaba ATH business group's Token Foundry. At the opening ceremony he took the stage immediately after Wu's keynote with a 15-minute talk titled "Qwen: Toward Real-World Agents."

Liu is from Zigong in Sichuan province and completed his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at Sichuan University's School of Computer Science, where he studied under professor Lyu Jiancheng with a focus on natural language generation and understanding. He has published more than 100 papers in venues including ACL, ICML, NeurIPS, EMNLP and AAAI, and his work has drawn over 60,000 citations on Google Scholar. He shared the NeurIPS 2025 best paper award as a corresponding author, alongside another corresponding author, Lin Junyang.

In 2020, Liu became the first student from southwestern China selected into the top tier of Huawei's "Genius Youth" program, with an annual salary of 2 million yuan. Only five students nationwide were chosen for that tier that year, and the list also included Zhi Hui Jun, who later became widely known. Huawei approached him first, but he did not join the company; after finishing his doctorate he entered Alibaba through its top campus recruitment track, known as Alibaba Star.

He joined the Damo Academy in 2021 and was responsible for the earliest pre-training work on the Qwen project, making him one of its original core members. He went on to lead development of the Qwen1 through Qwen3.5 language model series and the Qwen-Math series, played a core role in Qwen-Coder, VL and Omni, and has taken part in the release of more than 300 open-source Qwen models in total, according to QbitAI.

His promotion came in stages. Lin announced his departure on social media in March, and Zhou Jingren, then Alibaba Cloud CTO and head of the Tongyi Lab, temporarily took charge of the Qwen team. Liu added the post-training and coding teams to his existing pre-training responsibilities, reporting to Zhou, so that all three core parts of Qwen were effectively in his hands.

In June, Alibaba merged the Tongyi large model business unit with the Future Life Lab to form the Token Foundry business unit, placed directly under group CEO Eddie Wu. Zhou moved to become Alibaba's chief scientist, heading a newly created AI Future Research Institute focused on frontier research. After months of gradually expanded authority, Liu formally took full control of Qwen in recent weeks.

The model family he inherits remains competitive. The latest version, Qwen3.8 Max, ranks seventh on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, behind flagship models from Anthropic and OpenAI and Meta's Muse Spark 1.3. The "real-world agents" theme of his Yunqi talk points to where he intends to take Qwen next; Lin's first long essay after leaving also dealt with thinking about the agent era.