companies

Alibaba Tongyi

Alibaba Cloud's AI division behind the Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) LLM family and the open-source Wan video generation models.

Tongyi Lab is Alibaba Cloud's AI research division, formally established in 2022 building on prior research including the M6 large model. It launched the Tongyi Qianwen large language model (branded internationally as Qwen) in beta in April 2023, opening it to the public in September 2023 after regulatory clearance, with successive open-weight Qwen releases following. In February 2025, Alibaba open-sourced the Wan2.1 family of video generation models (including T2V-14B, T2V-1.3B, and I2V-14B variants) via Tongyi Lab; the models topped the VBench leaderboard for video generation at the time and are distributed on Hugging Face and Alibaba's ModelScope platform. In 2026 the division was restructured into the Tongyi Large Model Business Unit, with Alibaba Group VP Zhou Jingren leading the Qwen/Tongyi effort. As a division of Alibaba Group (NYSE/HKEX: BABA), Tongyi operates under Alibaba's public-company structure.

Founded

2022

Headquarters

Hangzhou, China

Sector

lab