Lin Chun-yang, the creator of Qwen, has founded a new AI lab with a target valuation of $2 billion.

According to Beating, Lin Junyang, former technical lead of Alibaba's Qwen model, is raising funds for his new AI lab, aiming for a valuation of approximately $2 billion. Sources familiar with the matter revealed that Gaorong Capital and Sequoia Capital China are in talks to participate in the investment, with the funding amount reaching several hundred million dollars. Negotiations are still ongoing, and the final valuation may be adjusted; the lab's name has not yet been disclosed. $2 billion is virtually unprecedented for a Chinese AI startup without a product. The core reason for this valuation is that Lin Junyang single-handedly built Qwen into a leading global open-source AI series during his three years at Alibaba, especially its low-cost, small models, which are extremely popular among developers worldwide. In early March of this year, Lin Junyang publicly announced his departure on X, even before Alibaba's official confirmation, marking a rare public break. After his departure, Alibaba merged the Qwen R&D team with other key AI businesses into a new business unit, directly managed by CEO Wu Yongming, and clearly shifted towards a closed-source commercialization strategy. Similar valuations in the US are even more outrageous: SSI, founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, received a $5 billion valuation within three months of its founding, and Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former CTO Mira Murati, had an initial valuation of $10 billion. However, several Chinese investors told The Information that new AI labs in China face greater uncertainties: the high valuations in the US partly bet on the expectation of an eventual acquisition by tech giants, a logic that doesn't hold true in China; furthermore, the continued tightening of US chip export controls makes acquiring computing power a significant hurdle in itself.