Breakthrough or Marketing Ploy? AI Agent Manus Sparks Frenzy

The new Chinese AI model Manus has garnered attention both domestically and internationally for its ability to effectively tackle a wide range of practical tasks. This was highlighted by journalists at SCMP.

Manus is positioned as a “general-purpose AI agent,” capable of booking trips, analyzing stocks, comparing insurance policies, and performing a variety of other tasks. The development is backed by Tencent-supported company Butterfly Effect, the publication notes.

The platform can operate without an API or other complex settings. It understands requests, accesses the internet, analyzes information on the screen, and performs tasks autonomously.

Access to the product remains restricted, available only by invitation. Some users reportedly pay significant sums for the opportunity to use the tool.

Unlike OpenAI, which charges $200 for access to advanced AI features, Manus is free. A small monthly fee is planned after the full release.

Due to server overloads, a secondary market for invitation codes to access the platform has emerged on the Chinese trading platform Xianyu. The cost of a beta account peaked at 10 million yuan ($1.3 million).

There is no way to reliably confirm this information. It is likely that a deal of such a large sum was made to create FOMO.

According to the developers, the model achieved advanced results in the GAIA benchmark, reflecting the capabilities of neural networks to handle agent functions.

Users have left positive reviews about Manus.

“It’s just madness. It feels like I’ve just been transported six months into the future. I sent it a zip file with 20 candidates for the CEO position. It thoroughly examined each of them, sequentially browsing web pages and taking notes, then ranked them based on the requirements.

Now it’s creating a web application for me to replace software we pay $6,000 a year for,” noted Tiny co-founder Andrew Wilkinson.

Positive remarks were also made by AI researcher Victor Mustar and Menlo Venture investor Deedy Das.

Criticism was not absent. A user on X with the nickname johns claimed that Manus’s popularity is due not to innovations but to a large-scale advertising campaign conducted in China.

Some noted the low performance of the neural network and expressed doubts regarding the use of third-party solutions.

“We use Claude and various Qwen-finetunes,” admitted Jichao Yi from Monica AI.

In January, Chinese startup DeepSeek sparked a frenzy by releasing the reasoning-oriented open-source model DeepSeek-R1.

OpenAI plans to charge up to $20,000 a month for specialized AI agents.