This acquisition is a complete joke in China. From the very beginning, the company focused almost entirely on marketing. Then, after a few months, it fled China and relocated to Singapore. Now that it’s been acquired by Meta, you could say it has finally fulfilled its mission.
Due diligence is a joke in the first place, nobody actually does anything these days beyond flip through some Powerpoints. They think their hockey stick graphs are some diligence but in reality every graph is engineered to be a hockey stick.
The vast majority of whether a deal is good or bad has nothing to do with anything you could be duly diligent about. It has everything do with whether the founders are clever executors to capture market, and the luck of the company in the coming years, the latter you cannot predict.
AI influencers on YouTube were going wild with demos for about 2 weeks around the middle of this year. It was enough to get me to sign up to the manus wait list but by the time they told me I was in I’d realised how superficial the recommendations from the YouTube crowd were. Also I’d seen a few waves of hype like that and realised how bogus the content was.
1. Manus was never targeting Chinese domestic market, for obvious reasons
2. Manus was founded by successful founder with exit, backed toptier investors in China, they always have great reputation in the AI industry
3. Prior to manus' launch, the team developed Monica, as they are the frontier AI chat bot aggregator
I really felt disgusted by stereotyping Chinese startup: they either baselessly downplay the innovation by the team, or they attribute their success to morally inferior conduct, which both are never really different than their western counterparts.
> they always have great reputation in the AI industry
Highly doubt this.
> the team developed Monica, as they are the frontier AI chat bot aggregator
How is this remotely technically impressive? LLM chat apps have been commoditized for years already.
Even within the Chinese tech/AI community, Manus has often been frowned upon. People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing went viral to demonstrate the point. Most of the positive coverage around Manus came from WeChat PR articles, which I'm sure you know how those Gongzhonghao work.
I agree that the West often stereotypes Chinese startups in unfair ways. But the Manus story is about as stereotypical as it gets.
> People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing went viral to demonstrate the point.
I tried openmanus and I frowned at openmanus team's intentionally attention grabbing gimmick after manus' overnight success, and open manus does not work at the moment.
> People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing
This is not a good sign but may not be as terrible as it used to be: it seems like as soon as one idea makes money someone else is able to reproduce it fast. The barrier for defensibility is so much higher than before.
I am also Chinese and AI user.
Manus is excellent, and it's hard to find a rival when it comes to making PPTs.
The effect of wild search is exaggerated.
The hype from official accounts is one thing, and the overwhelming scam comments on social media are another; neither is accurate.
It has been almost a year. If Manus were really as simple as just getting Open Manus up and running, we should have seen many similar products.
But unfortunately, there's only one Manus.
Manus attempted to ride the wave of DeepSeek and hired an army of influencers inside and outside of China, especially inside, to hype it up as the second coming of DeepSeek, even though they didn’t target the Chinese domestic market (as you correctly pointed out). IIRC it quickly became a joke in about two weeks after it became obvious that they were a thin layer on top of Claude and all marketing. I don’t know how they maneuvered into the current acquisition (feasting on Zuck’s fomo?), but saying “they always have great reputation in the AI industry” is laughable. This kind of garbage damages your reputation by loose association, you should be mad at them, not commenters.
Edit: Actually, the announcement doesn’t say anything about valuation, so it’s not even clear it’s a successful exit.
Riding a wave is fine. Stealing someone else’s clout and falsely advertising your product is not. This applies to every other shitty AI company with little to offer on top of someone else’s foundational model, regardless of origin country. It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.
Are they the only grifters? No, not by a long shot. Are they the only ones ridiculed? No.
> It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.
I still felt this baseless.
Manus at the time is break through result. Are they egregious in advertising they being deepseek moment? I don't know think so. Is it a marketing ploy? Yes, but it's far less egregious than any normal AI startup, like cluely.
Comparing to deepseek or qwen, heavy lifting what? Manus is built on Claude at the time it's doing egregious marketing, how can it be considered heavy lifted by unrelated products. What's the point you want to make?
It has nothing to do with being Chinese. The fact that the founder with previous connections is exactly what people are suggesting is a problem.
I think China will beat the US in AI but absolutely not using this silicon valley style bullshit model of valuation. Companies like the one that produced Deepseek using cutting edge academic research to do more with vastly less are hat will win. New algorithms will beat money. And the US has abandoned science, and thus it will lose.
If it has nothing to do with being Chinese founded, then why it stated obviously baseless statements without objections until myself pointed out the facts. I mean, manus is top tier by any measure in the startup scene, and someone just say that it's a joke, then sane people's immediate reaction should be asking why, right?
Why suddenly it becomes automatically accepted, other than being a Chinese founded startup, tell me, what else can prompts such mental inconsistency?
Butterfly Effect Technology was founded by entrepreneur Xiao Hong (Chinese: 肖弘), who previously established Nightingale Technology in 2015.[2] Nightingale developed productivity tools including "Yiban Assistant" (Chinese: 壹伴助手) and "Weiban Assistant" (Chinese: 微伴助手), AI-driven platforms serving over 2 million business users. These products attracted investment from Tencent and ZhenFund.[5]
In 2022, recognizing the potential of large language models, Xiao Hong founded Butterfly Effect and released Monica, an AI assistant browser extension integrating models including ChatGPT and Claude.[5] By 2024, Monica accumulated over 10 million users while maintaining profitability, serving as both a technological foundation and user acquisition platform for Manus.[5]
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Doesn't sound like a "company focused almost entirely on marketing".
They have browser automation, and a bunch of other agent tools to manage tasks, do things like PowerPoint slides, etc. I find chatgpt agent mode better for most tasks though.
I mean given they went on a crazy AI hiring spree and then desmantling the whole thing just a few weeks later... I'll actually need prove that there is anything in there.
I had to look. This tickled the copywriter in me: "Mission: To extend human reach by giving everyone the code to leverage their life." so you can leverage your life? never thought of that.
I am kind of skeptical about the report, as there are almost no details revealed. Everyone knows that China wants to build its own semeconductor manufacturing devices. The question is how close it is to be used in real production. The report just throws out a very vague number, maybe ~2030, which I can give the same guess, too.
It's my favorite distro so far. It works out of the box on my Zephyrus, with all the fixes needed for smooth performance, including, but not limited to, flawless iGPU/dGPU switching.
I don't quite get who the product targets. The only advantage I can think of is its retro design and its unique OS. But honestly, they are not attractive enough for me to pay 2k USD. I could build a more powerful server with the same money.
Isn’t it just that people are unimpressed with Microsoft Copilot? I’ve always felt that other models work quite well. If the implementation on their side has issues, they shouldn’t blame users for disliking it.
> The agency's Bureau of Industry and Security said in a statement Tuesday that it's also planning to warn the public about "the potential consequences of allowing US AI chips to be used for training and inference of Chinese AI models."
The A.I. war is intense, and you can clearly see who is s** their pants here.
This is just beyond stupid. Sanctions as in "not letting them use our advantage" might make some sense, but "not letting us use their advantage" is just another level of retardity.
The superior languages on your list just reflect your personal preferences. There are not perfect languages, just appropriate languages for given application.
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