Just After Launching Qwen3.5, Qwen's Core Team Walked Out. Is This the Last Great Qwen Model?

Yesterday I was testing Qwen3.5-4B on my machine, genuinely impressed by what a 4B model was doing with images and reasoning. Then I opened X and saw a five word post from Junyang Lin, the man who built Qwen from the ground up: "bye my beloved qwen." That was it. No explanation, no drama, just a goodbye. Within hours the replies were flooding in. Developers, researchers, open source contributors all asking the same thing — what just happened? And then Elon Musk's comment on Qwen3.5 calling it "impressive intelligence density" surfaced, and Lin replied with a simple "thx elon." People in the comments started connecting the dots — was he already gone when he replied? Did he know? Nobody is quite sure what to make of that exchange but it made the whole thing feel even stranger. Lin wasn't alone. Yu Bowen, who led post-training for Qwen, resigned the same day. Hui Binyuan, a core contributor focused on coding, had already left in January. Three of the most important people behind one of the best open source AI model families in the world, gone within months of each other. I had just tested the model. I had just written about why it was worth your attention. And now the people who built it had walked out.