Recently, a Chinese AI agent platform called Manus has attracted widespread attention on the Internet. The platform has quickly attracted a large number of users since its preview launch last week, and Hugging Face's product owner called it "the most impressive AI tool I've ever seen." Meanwhile, AI policy researcher Dean Ball also said that Manus is the "most complex computer AI." Manus' official Discord server attracted more than 138,000 members in just a few days, and even on the second-hand platform of China Xianyu, Manus' invitation code was hyped up to thousands of dollars.
However, is this popularity really worth it?
Manus was not developed entirely from scratch. According to reports on social media, the platform combines multiple existing and fine-tuned AI models, including Anthropic's Claude and Alibaba's Qwen, to be able to perform tasks such as writing research reports and analyzing financial documents. Nevertheless, on Manus's official website, Monica, the Chinese startup that developed it, gave many seemingly exaggerated features such as being able to buy real estate and programming video games.
In a video that sparked heated discussion, Yichao “Peak” Ji, head of research at Manus, claimed that Manus surpassed other tools in a popular AI assistant benchmark GAIA, such as OpenAI’s deep research. “[Manus] is not just a chatbot or workflow, it is a completely autonomous agent that bridges the gap between conception and execution,” Ji said.
However, some early users' experience with Manus was not satisfactory. Alexander Doria, co-founder of AI startup Pleias, said on X that he encountered problems with error messages and infinite loops during testing. Other users also pointed out that Manus often makes mistakes when answering factual questions and inconsistently quotes of its work, often missing some information that is easily searched online.
Despite the users’ reflections on these issues, Manus’ popularity remains high. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is the uniqueness brought about by the scarcity of its invitations.
It is worth mentioning that Monica did not develop an independent model, but used the existing model, which is in contrast to China's AI company DeepSeek. While many of DeepSeek's technologies are public, Monica has not yet fully opened up its technologies.
Monica said Manus is still in its early access phase and is working to expand computing power and fix reported issues. However, it seems that Manus’ technical commitments have not yet reached the height of its publicity.
Key points:
Manus is a highly-watched Chinese intelligent AI platform that has quickly attracted a large number of users.
User feedback Manus has various technical problems, such as error messages and incomplete functionality.
Manus' popularity is closely related to its development background and media publicity, but its performance has not yet met expectations.