PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Junyang Lin

Junyang Lin is an AI researcher who helped build Alibaba’s Qwen family of models. He joined Alibaba’s DAMO Academy in 2019 and led Qwen’s development from 2023, including work on Qwen2.5 and its variants. In 2025, he co-authored the Qwen3 technical report and a gated-attention paper that won a NeurIPS Best Paper award. As of October 2026, he is the founder of Pragmatik Labs, which researches agents for digital and physical worlds.

Now at
Pragmatik Labs
Works
163

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.

Timeline

  1. 2019

    Joining Alibaba DAMO Academy

    He joins Alibaba’s DAMO Academy in 2019 and works on language generation for Taobao search.

  2. 2023–2025

    Leading Qwen at Alibaba

    By December 2023, he leads Qwen at Alibaba. From 2023, he is responsible for developing, open-sourcing, and applying the Qwen series, including Qwen2.5, Qwen2.5-VL, Qwen2.5-Omni, and Qwen2.5-Coder.

  3. 2025

    The Qwen3 technical report

    He co-authors the Qwen3 technical report in 2025, which describes dense and mixture-of-experts models ranging from 0.6 to 235 billion parameters.

  4. 2025

    A NeurIPS Best Paper

    His co-authored paper “Gated Attention for Large Language Models: Non-linearity, Sparsity, and Attention-Sink-Free” receives a NeurIPS 2025 Best Paper award.

  5. March 2026

    Stepping down from Qwen

    He steps down from the Qwen project in March 2026 as Alibaba unveils its Qwen 3.5 open-weight small models.

  6. Since August 2026

    Founding Pragmatik Labs

    In August 2026, he founds Pragmatik Labs in Shanghai to research next-generation agents across digital and physical worlds.

Sources and credits

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  1. The man who built Qwen has a new lab, and the Shanghai government is an investor thenextweb.com. Checked 15 October 2026.
  2. Qwen: Towards a Generalist Model cse.hkust.edu.hk. Checked 15 October 2026.
  3. PolyU Research Student Conference 2025 - Keynote II events.polyu.edu.hk. Checked 15 October 2026.
  4. Qwen3 Technical Report arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  5. Gated Attention for Large Language Models: Non-linearity, Sparsity, and Attention-Sink-Free proceedings.neurips.cc. Checked 15 October 2026.
  6. Announcing the NeurIPS 2025 Best Paper Awards blog.neurips.cc. Checked 15 October 2026.
  7. Alibaba’s Qwen tech lead steps down after major AI push techcrunch.com. Checked 15 October 2026.
  8. Former Alibaba Qwen AI model leader founds new AI company with funding from venture giants thestandard.com.hk. Checked 15 October 2026.