2 days ago
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Alibaba's world-leading AI lab becomes a target for talent poaching by Chinese rivals
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
's Explore Academy, a research division founded in 2020 to focus on frontier technology, Chinese media reported.
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 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 and recently transitioned to Tencent's Hunyuan AI model team, Chinese media reported.
