Yan Zhijie, former head of Alibaba Tongyi Voice, joined JD Exploration Research Institute

Shen Mama's Moments Z Finance 05 Aug 2025 18:28

On August 2nd Beijing time, according to informed sources, Yan Zhijie, former head of the Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen voice team and former deputy director of Tencent AI Lab, has joined JD Exploration Research Institute as the head of the voice laboratory and reported to He Xiaodong, Vice President of JD Group and Dean of Exploration Research Institute.

In 2015, Yan Zhijie was recruited by Alibaba to serve as the Director of the Intelligent Voice Interaction Team at IDST (predecessor of Damo Institute), and was promoted to the head of Damo Institute's Voice Laboratory in 2017. During his tenure, he not only participated in the design and optimization of the underlying voice system architecture, but also led the development of the "Tongyi Tingwu" project at a key node in the rise of large-scale models, making it Alibaba's first voice large-scale model application open to C-end users, and undertaking the experimental field for Alibaba's large-scale models to move towards productization in the voice direction.

In February 2025, Yan Zhijie resigned from Alibaba and briefly joined Tencent AI Lab as Deputy Director. However, Tencent quickly underwent a TEG architecture restructuring at the end of April, with the original AI Lab and multiple research teams being dismantled and integrated into the "Large Language Modeling Department" and "Multimodal Modeling Department", under the direct leadership of Vice President Jiang Jie. Under the restructuring of the organization, Yan Zhijie's departure quickly became clear, and he chose to resign again only three months later.

Yan Zhijie's frequent mobility reflects the comprehensive battle for core technical talents among technology giants in the era of big models. In this competition, Alibaba is undoubtedly the hunting ground that has been "hunted" the deepest. Former visual director Bo Liefeng has transferred to Tencent's hybrid team, responsible for multimodal direction; Zhou Chang, the core figure of Tongyi, leads the team to jump to ByteDance and get higher rank treatment at the edge of the non competition agreement; Yang Hongxia, the former head of the M6 model, had resigned earlier and has now joined universities.

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