This is Manus: the new Chinese AI agent that has divided the digital community

A new artificial intelligence has just burst onto the digital scene, sparking all kinds of opinions. This is Manus, a general AI agent developed by the Chinese startup Butterfly Effect and it was introduced in preview last week.

What Manus Is

“Manus is a general AI agent that connects ideas with actions: it does not just think, it delivers results. Manus excels in various tasks at work and in life, getting everything done while you rest.” This is how this AI defines itself on its own website.

A rather bold description if we take into account the meaning of “general AI” or AGI: an AI capable of performing intellectual tasks that would require human intelligence, being able to understand, learn, reason, plan, make decisions, and adapt to new situations autonomously, as a human person would do.

Considering that, currently, no technology has reached this level, it is difficult to believe that Manus is the exception. Rather, we might be looking at a deep reasoning agent, a capability that AI models like ChatGPT or Perplexity have already presented.

The company claims that Manus is capable of performing various “real-world tasks through step-by-step iterations”. For example, this agent can create a personalized itinerary for a trip, create a detailed analysis of a company’s actions, or analyze the sales data of your eCommerce and provide you with tailored strategies.

Yichao “Peak” Ji, co-founder and Chief Scientist of Manus, stated in a presentation video that Manus: “is not just another chatbot or workflow. It is a fully autonomous agent that bridges the gap between conception and execution. While other AIs are limited to generating ideas, Manus delivers results. We see it as the next paradigm of human-machine collaboration and, potentially, a glimpse of general artificial intelligence“.

This New AI Is Based on Other Models

As for its development, Manus is not an AI that Butterfly Effect has created entirely from scratch, but rather is based on existing models such as Claude 3.7 by Anthropic or Qwen by Alibaba.

This fact has been confirmed by Yichao “Peak” Ji in a post on Twitter. “Indeed, we use many different open-source technologies, which is why I specifically mentioned in the launch video that Manus would not exist without the open-source community. We will have a series of recognitions and collaborations coming soon“.

Currently, it is only possible to access Manus by invitation. This exclusivity has caused interest in trying this AI to increase, with invitation codes being sold on Xianyu, a Chinese second-hand eCommerce, for up to 55,000 yuan (approximately $6,940 USD).

Manus sparks diverse opinions

In the presentation video, Yichao “Peak” Ji claimed that Manus had demonstrated superior performance in some tests compared to the capabilities of Deep Research and Operator by OpenAI. Likewise, external voices have also spoken out praising this new AI.

Victor Mustar, Head of Product at Hugging Face, declared that Manus is “the most impressive AI tool I have tried“.

For his part, Dean Ball, an AI policy researcher, pointed out that: “The novelty of Manus is that it is *better* than any public American artificial intelligence that I know of in a specific capacity (use of computers). That is significant, but the product itself still has some flaws and the underlying software is not that intelligent“.

Nonetheless, this technology has not managed to win over everyone who has tried it. Several people have shared their discontent or disappointment regarding the outcomes obtained when using Manus.

For instance, Alexander Doria, co-founder of the AI startup Pleias, claimed: “After experimenting with it, I like the user interface, but it is basically a workflow, not a real agent (at least nothing beyond the integrated agent capabilities of Claude)“.

The digital media outlet TechCrunch has been able to test this model. However, it reported that the results achieved in the tests conducted “have not been particularly positive“.

There are also those who cannot avoid comparing Manus with its compatriot DeepSeek, although the latter was indeed developed internally and is open source. In this regard, Manus could transition to open source soon.

“Our team has always had an open-source tradition, and I have personally been sharing my later-trained models on HuggingFace. In the near future, we will publish many good things in open source“, explained Yichao “Peak” Ji on Twitter.

Photo: Manus