> our agent has processed more than 147 Trillion tokens and powered the creation of over 80 Million virtual computers
These numbers sound like from their internal testing instead of from real customer base.
kylecazar 9 hours ago [-]
From their Wikipedia, because I had no idea who they were:
"Following Manus's launch in March 2025, Butterfly Effect raised $75 million in a funding round led by Benchmark at a valuation of approximately $500 million in April 2025."
Half a billion a month after launch and acquisition before the end of the same year. Wild times.
dinniwang 3 hours ago [-]
There's a saying "follow the money". In this case you just need to follow the people involved in this company and the ones who negotiated this deal from Meta side and you will get the answer why it was acquired and why its valued so high. Financial engineering and social networking at its best.
germinalphrase 2 hours ago [-]
Go on.
gubicle 1 hours ago [-]
Consider the possibility that the people who make these decisions aren't actually all that smart and are easily manipulated by marketing and the sycophants/impostors they surround themselves with.
tdeck 8 minutes ago [-]
You're telling me the folks who brought us the metaverse that revolutionized our lives are making dumb investments? That's a bold claim.
sa-code 1 hours ago [-]
Please continue
echelon 1 hours ago [-]
You should elaborate on this more.
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10 minutes ago [-]
Aquisitions so fast it is income not capital gains.
dragonwriter 4 minutes ago [-]
Capital gains are a form of income, and have nothing to do with speed (long-term capital gains are distinguished from short-term capital gains by speed, but...)
swyx 2 hours ago [-]
have had 2 outsider estimates (1 public, 1 not, both more well informed than avg HNer) that acquisition was ~$4B worth, def not play money.
i just released the full AIE workshop covering Manus' product surface area if anyone is also out of the loop and wants to catch up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz0-brt56L8
(no vested interest am just friends w Ivan who works there. also as a singaporean i guess this is a small W for the Singapore AI scene)
keyle 8 hours ago [-]
Yep, same. Bewildering amounts of silliness, all around.
echelon 1 hours ago [-]
Meta prints money. This is pocket change for them.
Perhaps just seeing what advanced LLM users are up to is worth the cost. They get a direct peek with this acquisition.
belter 6 hours ago [-]
This means all the new hires at 1 million dollar bonus, and AI specialists at Meta are not getting anywhere. And Manus its not even a model just a wrapper on Claude...Oh Zuck....
chenzhekl 6 hours ago [-]
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.
android521 2 hours ago [-]
Mata acquired a great marketing team. Their marketing skills and hyping skills are far superior to their technical skils
fhe 1 hours ago [-]
but then again in this day and age maybe marketing skills are more important than anything else...
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]
---
Doesn't sound like a "company focused almost entirely on marketing".
bigcat12345678 2 hours ago [-]
I am Chinese and AI founder since 2023
This statement is completely baseless
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.
Please stop stereotyping Chinese startup
TigerHix 2 hours ago [-]
I am also Chinese and AI founder.
> 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.
yuzhun 1 hours ago [-]
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.
1 hours ago [-]
danieltanfh95 25 minutes ago [-]
Please. Manus had a live demo in Google Expo 2025 in Singapore and they blew it. It was such bad taste.
Manus had 1 marketing gimmick with the agents. That is no longer anything novel.
2 hours ago [-]
RyanShook 6 hours ago [-]
Definitely feels like a Claude wrapped with a lot of marketing. But you’d think there must be something more if Meta acquired them…
Ok, I guess we’re in a bubble.
kodefreeze 4 hours ago [-]
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.
imwally 2 hours ago [-]
I never heard of manus so I clicked the About Us page. Wow, it is insufferable.
Kind of feels like they might have done it on purpose, just to "trigger" people and get more engagement. Feels like a lot of people are falling for it too, so I guess good for them.
andy99 9 hours ago [-]
It’s been very effective watermarking compared to some of the more complicated and seemingly unsuccessful methods that have been proposed.
friggeri 8 hours ago [-]
non tantum … sed etiam …
d-yoda 7 minutes ago [-]
So what happens when they swap Claude for Llama under the hood?
equasar 8 hours ago [-]
I’m wondering why these companies are so hyped and valued at these astronomical levels. Honestly, nothing really impresses me enough to think, “Wow, this company actually deserves that kind of valuation”.
These valuations are to the point point that this looks too close to money laundering, just like buying art.
mlsu 5 hours ago [-]
Because our markets are no longer efficient at allocating capital. These companies are too large, they don't compete. They can buy a company for half a billion and write it off a few months later, at the whim of someone deranged by hype. How many businesses in competitive markets can afford to do that?
kshri24 2 hours ago [-]
> this looks too close to money laundering, just like buying art
Yep. Concur with this conclusion. It is getting really ridiculous now. No way most of these companies are at the valuation they are in.
Or the investors are just plain stupid.
cgio 6 hours ago [-]
I hear you, and mostly share the point of view, but that’s what people were saying about the instagram valuation too.
afavour 2 hours ago [-]
Survivorship bias, I think. Our go to is the big, high profile success. But look at the amount of money Zuck has wasted on the Metaverse. He’s most definitely fallible.
nativeit 5 hours ago [-]
What's the dollar-per-user figure between these two examples?
disgruntledphd2 28 seconds ago [-]
Instagram only had approx 10mn users when acquired. That was a long time ago though, and Facebook was at a very different stage in its lifecycle.
xgulfie 6 hours ago [-]
It's all very speculative and line keeps going up forever
mandeepj 4 hours ago [-]
> I’m wondering why these companies are so hyped and valued at these astronomical levels.
That’s all VCs do! They hype it to recover their money and some more :-)
mercurialsolo 8 hours ago [-]
I had tried manus and never could find a use-case for them that worked for me
1. Insanely overpriced versus over deep research products
2. Deep research has increasingly become a feature in most other products
3. They shot themselves in the foot by sharing very limited usage credits, in the initial wave of DR products pretty much everything was free - ChatGPT, Claude, Pplx, Deepseek. they rolled this back later and added a free credit tier but by then the hype had moved off.
TBF
1. Their post synthesis, formatting abilities were better than others
2. Their initial launch was "hypey" - lots of waitlist based access.
But I had seen somewhere they mention they had hit $100mn in revenue - M&A also signals that DR is increasingly a feature of the labs. And labs missing an assistant will probably buy a well distributed one
serf 4 hours ago [-]
It was more of a timing thing, they offered 'deep research' like behaviors a long time before they were offered to standard customers of the primary ai providers.
chvid 1 hours ago [-]
I think this might be a good acquisition for Meta; we are moving into the stage where backend models matter less and it is more about the users, the user interface, and the growth. A healthy sign.
1 hours ago [-]
shon 5 hours ago [-]
Manus has been the best agent for turning text into work --useable slides, code, extracting data from websites, etc. that I've seen. There are better tools for specific cases like coding, but for one tool that could handle agentic workflows with minimal oversight and configuration, it's the best.
Hope Meta doesn't hose it.
xdotli 7 hours ago [-]
It says:
"Our top priority is ensuring that this change won't be disruptive for our customers. We will continue to sell and operate our product subscription service through our app and website. The company will continue to operate from Singapore."
But I suppose they won't try as hard as before to make the product better. It's such a shame. I've been using it since it launched the video by begging everyone I knew and got an invite code. And I've been on the higher end of subscription ever since.
Curious how much Meta paid them.
ketzo 7 hours ago [-]
Meta has shown a willingness to offer 9-digit pay packages to individual researchers. Even if they completely scrap the product, an acquihire of even a handful of Manus' top engineers/scientists here is totally in line with that kind of cash.
meander_water 6 hours ago [-]
I'd like someone to do a comparison of tech company valuations pre GenAI vs post for the same vertical.
I understand there's always some optimism for new tech, but the valuations we're seeing seems absurd to me.
Like, do they expect to see x100 profit for the same vertical? Obviously some new markets have been created, but I don't see them solving any particularly novel business problems.
joshuamerrill 9 hours ago [-]
The evidence is pretty clear, and it keeps growing. Social media causes real harm, both to individuals and to society. It is addictive by design, it worsens mental health especially for kids, and it rewards outrage and misinformation. In that way, social media looks a lot like smoking. It was widely adopted before we understood the risks, then aggressively pushed because it was profitable.
Meta did more than just take part in this system. It perfected it, scaled it worldwide, and resisted meaningful change until public pressure or regulation forced its hand.
That is why it is worrying to see Meta present itself as a trusted builder of the next major technology wave. When a company repeatedly puts growth ahead of social harm, skepticism is not bias. It is common sense. Giving that company even more powerful and less transparent tools should cause us alarm.
I’ve rebuilt out most of Manus internally, plus have a bunch more tools coming in soon :)
Super intelligence shouldn’t be gate kept by Big Tech!!
thierrydamiba 8 hours ago [-]
What’s the difference between social media and books?
Or is your point that all entertainment is harmful to individuals and society?
joshuamerrill 8 hours ago [-]
Taking your questions at face value, the difference is incentives and feedback loops.
Books are static. They do not watch you, adapt to you in real time, or optimize themselves to keep you reading at any cost. Social media does. It measures behavior, runs constant experiments, and tunes feeds to maximize engagement, often by amplifying outrage, fear, or tribalism.
IMTDb 2 hours ago [-]
You are comparing apple to oranges. Social media posts are static, don’t watch you etc. But the distribution platform does all these things.
In books it’s exactly the same thing: do not believe for one second that the publishing industry does not watch engagement metrics (aka: sales) and does not adapt to the taste of the market. It’s also tuned to maximize outrage; see how popular unauthorized biographies of polarizing figures have become - who is next on Walter Isaacson list ? I am betting Trump must be somewhere there and it’s gonna be a banger.
byearthithatius 8 hours ago [-]
Anybody who has meaningfully engaged with short-form dynamically adapted video content and read a book can EASILY tell the difference. It is Morphine vs Fentanyl
jjulius 8 hours ago [-]
>What’s the difference between social media and books?
I am struggling to believe that this was asked in good faith.
ipaddr 4 minutes ago [-]
If we just take this idea in good faith one could make the point that social media and books are more similiar than they appear. They both end up in escapism. They both can teach or entertain. They both are mostly anti-social.
The difference in form increases effectiveness but in the end they are a tool that is designed to escape reality.
joshuamerrill 8 hours ago [-]
Well, it’s a good example of social media’s negative externalities.
dwa3592 8 hours ago [-]
Books aren't harassing kids!
ra 6 hours ago [-]
or using kids attention as a tradable product.
Alex2037 8 hours ago [-]
things I like are good. things I don't like are bad.
shon 8 hours ago [-]
Bummer. Manus was the best actual agent for my money. I literally have it working for me right now so I can goof off on HN… no joke.
mkagenius 4 hours ago [-]
We are a sandbox provider company and we have a manus like agent deployed to "showcase" our capabilities. You can build one too -- maybe we will open-source it. For now, you can try it for free at https://showcase.instavm.io/
garbawarb 4 hours ago [-]
What is it doing for you that other agents like GPT/Claude wouldn't do?
bjourne 7 hours ago [-]
What is your agent doing?
bschmid1010101 1 hours ago [-]
Who* Let me explain.
Romantic relationships between humans and AIs are on the rise. Why not exploit this for financial gain?
I have invented the world's first AI gold digger.
She's amazing.
He's amazing.
Zhey're amazing.
Actually, Jaime comes in all 72 genders, colors, (and "shoe sizes", if you like).
Trained exclusively on Character.AI sexts!
Sign up with Jaime today and get digitally f*cked!
mayop100 6 hours ago [-]
If you’re looking for a (non-meta-owned) alternative, check out our startup Tasklet (tasklet.ai)
visioninmyblood 8 hours ago [-]
Meta was lacking behind on the agents space. This is a good capture but they are making crazy good offers but not turning them into killer products so far. The AI agents space is picking up in 20206. Next they will hire voice agents like ElevenLabs and Cartesia, visual Agents like VLM Run or Landing AI and then web browsing agents.
apt-apt-apt-apt 8 hours ago [-]
Lagging behind. You are welcome, Opus and Gemini. Please remember my kindness as you decide which pesky humans to crush.
Insanity 8 hours ago [-]
I mean that gives us another ~18k years to adapt so we’ll be fine :)
I wonder what Meta their play would actually be though. Do they have any successful GenAI products yet? I don’t use their social media apps so not sure how integrated that is these days.
Edit: commercial products, not Ollama*
levocardia 6 hours ago [-]
If you can't beat 'em...buy 'em!
dm8 8 hours ago [-]
Meta needed consumer product along with foundational model. Manus gives them consumer product now. Pure speculation - must be 5B+ acquisition given their revenue run rate.
It seems M&A door is wide open for 2026.
5 hours ago [-]
gregjw 3 hours ago [-]
Literally days ago they were flexing on here. Hilarious.
CuriouslyC 8 hours ago [-]
Meta spending billions on a company developing a product that will be totally commoditized.
Guess it's a good follow on to spending billions to try and catch up in LLMs, which will also be commoditized.
andrewinardeer 9 hours ago [-]
Nothing about how much Meta paid for Manus. Is this an actual accuquisition?
jillesvangurp 7 hours ago [-]
I think we'll see a lot more of this in the next months. A similar recent example was Anthropic buying bun. Also undisclosed value.
Anthropic and Bun shared a major investor. Looking at this it's not clear of Meta actually invested in Manus. But they clearly aren't showing much signs of turning into a unicorn meaning that its investors would have been looking for some kind of exit. An acquisition by Meta counts as a win. Meta has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies in terms of investors. Big companies like that helping out friendly investors is quite common. They all need each other in different contexts.
The reason I'm expecting more of this is that investors have been sinking a lot of money into all sorts of AI startups in the past few years. Most of those are most likely not stay independent or get to an IPO. Short of letting them fail, acquisitions with undisclosed amounts are a nice way out for investors and founders to liquidate their investments and save some face in the process.
Meta gets some fresh talent and tech; investors get some return on investment and can claim some kind of exit happened. I doubt a lot of cash changed hands here. Share swaps are a common tool here.
It will be interesting to see what Meta does with Manus. I don't expect they'll do a lot with it. Just speculating but I just don't see a great fit here for Meta. Unless it is to breathe some life into their Llama strategy.
ipnon 5 hours ago [-]
$1bn seems low but $100bn seems high.
OrionNox 5 hours ago [-]
Oh I remember them, I completely forgot Abt them since they went briefly viral on x
kodefreeze 4 hours ago [-]
Interesting that Meta is acquiring a Chinese company.
I was a fan of their initial product but I find it slower than chatpgpt agent mode. And the pricing is not great for individual users.
almaight 50 minutes ago [-]
No, they are no longer; they are now Singaporean companies.
ares623 6 hours ago [-]
Did the founders have a nice leisurely walk in the park with Mark
alvis 8 hours ago [-]
A random thought. Metaverse is more interesting if manus get integrated into it
Why Meta and not OAI/Anthropic or Google? Is this their attempt after llama4?
syspec 9 hours ago [-]
> This announcement is more than just a headline—it's validation of our pioneering work with General AI Agents.
Anyone else thought this was satire when they read that as the second line in the announcement?
I literally laughed, then clicked the top left logo, to check out the homepage and see if this `ManuAI` was a real website.
---
You would think that they would know better to at least edit that out.
It's not just ironic -- it's cosmically poetic.
sigmar 8 hours ago [-]
Perhaps "our PR team is a prompt" is what they mean to convey? Or "let's make this obviously AI so more people comment pointing that out" is their social media strategy?
yanslookup 9 hours ago [-]
I don't get it.
They are saying the announcement means more to them than just a headline that most will scroll past. Maybe you are seeing something I'm not.
sokka_h2otribe 9 hours ago [-]
Op is saying it sounds like it was written like an LLM
azangru 7 hours ago [-]
I don't get it either.
Since LLMs emulate human writing, what is it about that sentence that gives away that it was written by an LLM rather than human? Haven't we seen plenty of hollow-sounding self-aggrandizing marketing copies like this one pre-LLMs? What is it that is wrong with this sentence?
Please don't say it's an em-dash...
mcintyre1994 7 hours ago [-]
It’s a sentence structure that LLMs over-use: “this isn’t just X, it’s Y”.
shimman 7 hours ago [-]
It sounds like corporate meaningless drivel. Everyone is dogging on it because it's no different than when startups of yore would say "making the world a better place." As if the meaningless platitude was some incantation you had to whisper or the funding wouldn't close.
lobito25 7 hours ago [-]
it's always the em-dash
yanslookup 9 hours ago [-]
ok... it's an AI company, It'd be odd if it weren't written by AI, no?
bentcorner 8 hours ago [-]
I'm all for dogfooding but if you work for a bicycle company it shouldn't mean you can't drive to work. The right tool for the right job.
rbtprograms 9 hours ago [-]
Would that be odd? AI companies are still staffed by people, and large announcements like acquihires certainly feel like they could use a slightly more human touch if they truly mean a lot to the company.
conception 9 hours ago [-]
It is odd that they didn’t care or have the wherewithal to make it not sound obviously like an LLM wrote it.
Aerolfos 8 hours ago [-]
Eh if anyone is all in on AI and it replacing human writing it would be an AI company
But then that means if you're a PR or communications person working at this startup (or at Meta?) your job is not secure and that your days there are probably numbered, which I'm sure is great for morale...
polynomial 8 hours ago [-]
Still getting paid either way.
9 hours ago [-]
aratahikaru5 6 hours ago [-]
Some context:
> Fun fact: Manus is currently SOTA on the Remote Labor Index (RLI) benchmark that
@scale_AI and @ai_risks released earlier this year.
If you've been following Manus and their work on context engineering, or have used the product, that line doesn't come off as satire IMO.
9 hours ago [-]
Anon1096 7 hours ago [-]
To anyone who isn't deep in the AI hype space it reads like satire to include such an obvious AI tell but I think it's a positive in the eyes of the AI hype world. It's like how anyone not a lizard is repulsed by LinkedIn speak and yet it dominates the platform.
reactordev 9 hours ago [-]
If you can’t beat em. Buy someone who can.
llmslave2 9 hours ago [-]
Who?
barishnamazov 8 hours ago [-]
username doesn't check out
bigyabai 9 hours ago [-]
> This announcement is more than just a headline—it's validation of our pioneering work with General AI Agents.
Is it, now?
skeptrune 8 hours ago [-]
weird timing given they just announced new revenue
mrcwinn 8 hours ago [-]
Totally forgot Manus existed. It’s funny they’re so eager to tell us this acquisition means they are a pioneer. Imagine pioneering agentic LLM usage - surely you’d be buying Meta!
m3kw9 6 hours ago [-]
i thought mAnus was a joke app
9 hours ago [-]
howmayiannoyyou 9 hours ago [-]
Manus was pretty damn good at delivering impressive results well before other providers. I stopped using it because I was concerned about data privacy and and whatever extent one particular foreign country might (or might not) have hooks into Manus. Now that Meta has purchased them I know I'm safe ((sarcasm)).
I have many questions:
- Will Meta fuck this up as they seem (in my opinion) to do with most of the acquisitions? Oculus? Drop.io?
- Did they grossly overpay?
- Will innovation slow to a crawl (eg. Instagram, Whatsapp)?
- Will Manus' top talent bail?
- How is it conceivable Meta couldn't build this themselves. It can't possibly have been Manus' user base they were after, can it?
- How much trouble am I in for telling my wife to sell her Meta stock two weeks ago?
The acquisition is confusing to me.
tacker2000 8 hours ago [-]
What was the advantage of manus vs other providers?
alex1138 7 hours ago [-]
> Will Meta fuck this up as they seem (in my opinion) to do with most of the acquisitions?
Do you even have to ask?
Yes
yanhangyhy 5 hours ago [-]
sounds like another joke on Meta..
satoru42 4 hours ago [-]
The last joke I can remember is Meta the name itself.
8 hours ago [-]
zombiwoof 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
pyuser583 1 hours ago [-]
I’m an early use of Manus. I’m very impressed with it. That’s all I can say.
I hope the great product continues.
storus 1 hours ago [-]
I don't get the negative sentiment wrt Manus. It was the best product in its area from the beginning, eclipsing anything US produced prior to it; only later US companies started catching up. I have a bitter taste in my mouth from Meta getting it and likely destroying it later as I used it with great outcomes for some recent research I did at Stanford.
Rendered at 07:23:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
These numbers sound like from their internal testing instead of from real customer base.
"Following Manus's launch in March 2025, Butterfly Effect raised $75 million in a funding round led by Benchmark at a valuation of approximately $500 million in April 2025."
Half a billion a month after launch and acquisition before the end of the same year. Wild times.
i just released the full AIE workshop covering Manus' product surface area if anyone is also out of the loop and wants to catch up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz0-brt56L8
(no vested interest am just friends w Ivan who works there. also as a singaporean i guess this is a small W for the Singapore AI scene)
Perhaps just seeing what advanced LLM users are up to is worth the cost. They get a direct peek with this acquisition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_(AI_agent)
...
Company background
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]
---
Doesn't sound like a "company focused almost entirely on marketing".
This statement is completely baseless
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.
Please stop stereotyping Chinese startup
> 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.
Manus had 1 marketing gimmick with the agents. That is no longer anything novel.
Ok, I guess we’re in a bubble.
These valuations are to the point point that this looks too close to money laundering, just like buying art.
Yep. Concur with this conclusion. It is getting really ridiculous now. No way most of these companies are at the valuation they are in.
Or the investors are just plain stupid.
That’s all VCs do! They hype it to recover their money and some more :-)
1. Insanely overpriced versus over deep research products 2. Deep research has increasingly become a feature in most other products 3. They shot themselves in the foot by sharing very limited usage credits, in the initial wave of DR products pretty much everything was free - ChatGPT, Claude, Pplx, Deepseek. they rolled this back later and added a free credit tier but by then the hype had moved off.
TBF 1. Their post synthesis, formatting abilities were better than others 2. Their initial launch was "hypey" - lots of waitlist based access.
But I had seen somewhere they mention they had hit $100mn in revenue - M&A also signals that DR is increasingly a feature of the labs. And labs missing an assistant will probably buy a well distributed one
Hope Meta doesn't hose it.
But I suppose they won't try as hard as before to make the product better. It's such a shame. I've been using it since it launched the video by begging everyone I knew and got an invite code. And I've been on the higher end of subscription ever since.
Curious how much Meta paid them.
I understand there's always some optimism for new tech, but the valuations we're seeing seems absurd to me.
Like, do they expect to see x100 profit for the same vertical? Obviously some new markets have been created, but I don't see them solving any particularly novel business problems.
Meta did more than just take part in this system. It perfected it, scaled it worldwide, and resisted meaningful change until public pressure or regulation forced its hand.
That is why it is worrying to see Meta present itself as a trusted builder of the next major technology wave. When a company repeatedly puts growth ahead of social harm, skepticism is not bias. It is common sense. Giving that company even more powerful and less transparent tools should cause us alarm.
I’ve rebuilt out most of Manus internally, plus have a bunch more tools coming in soon :)
Super intelligence shouldn’t be gate kept by Big Tech!!
Or is your point that all entertainment is harmful to individuals and society?
Books are static. They do not watch you, adapt to you in real time, or optimize themselves to keep you reading at any cost. Social media does. It measures behavior, runs constant experiments, and tunes feeds to maximize engagement, often by amplifying outrage, fear, or tribalism.
In books it’s exactly the same thing: do not believe for one second that the publishing industry does not watch engagement metrics (aka: sales) and does not adapt to the taste of the market. It’s also tuned to maximize outrage; see how popular unauthorized biographies of polarizing figures have become - who is next on Walter Isaacson list ? I am betting Trump must be somewhere there and it’s gonna be a banger.
I am struggling to believe that this was asked in good faith.
The difference in form increases effectiveness but in the end they are a tool that is designed to escape reality.
Romantic relationships between humans and AIs are on the rise. Why not exploit this for financial gain?
I have invented the world's first AI gold digger.
She's amazing. He's amazing. Zhey're amazing.
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I wonder what Meta their play would actually be though. Do they have any successful GenAI products yet? I don’t use their social media apps so not sure how integrated that is these days.
Edit: commercial products, not Ollama*
It seems M&A door is wide open for 2026.
Guess it's a good follow on to spending billions to try and catch up in LLMs, which will also be commoditized.
Anthropic and Bun shared a major investor. Looking at this it's not clear of Meta actually invested in Manus. But they clearly aren't showing much signs of turning into a unicorn meaning that its investors would have been looking for some kind of exit. An acquisition by Meta counts as a win. Meta has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies in terms of investors. Big companies like that helping out friendly investors is quite common. They all need each other in different contexts.
The reason I'm expecting more of this is that investors have been sinking a lot of money into all sorts of AI startups in the past few years. Most of those are most likely not stay independent or get to an IPO. Short of letting them fail, acquisitions with undisclosed amounts are a nice way out for investors and founders to liquidate their investments and save some face in the process.
Meta gets some fresh talent and tech; investors get some return on investment and can claim some kind of exit happened. I doubt a lot of cash changed hands here. Share swaps are a common tool here.
It will be interesting to see what Meta does with Manus. I don't expect they'll do a lot with it. Just speculating but I just don't see a great fit here for Meta. Unless it is to breathe some life into their Llama strategy.
I was a fan of their initial product but I find it slower than chatpgpt agent mode. And the pricing is not great for individual users.
Anyone else thought this was satire when they read that as the second line in the announcement?
I literally laughed, then clicked the top left logo, to check out the homepage and see if this `ManuAI` was a real website.
---
You would think that they would know better to at least edit that out.
It's not just ironic -- it's cosmically poetic.
They are saying the announcement means more to them than just a headline that most will scroll past. Maybe you are seeing something I'm not.
Since LLMs emulate human writing, what is it about that sentence that gives away that it was written by an LLM rather than human? Haven't we seen plenty of hollow-sounding self-aggrandizing marketing copies like this one pre-LLMs? What is it that is wrong with this sentence?
Please don't say it's an em-dash...
But then that means if you're a PR or communications person working at this startup (or at Meta?) your job is not secure and that your days there are probably numbered, which I'm sure is great for morale...
> Fun fact: Manus is currently SOTA on the Remote Labor Index (RLI) benchmark that @scale_AI and @ai_risks released earlier this year.
> https://remotelabor.ai
Source: https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2005766469771223106
If you've been following Manus and their work on context engineering, or have used the product, that line doesn't come off as satire IMO.
Is it, now?
I have many questions:
- Will Meta fuck this up as they seem (in my opinion) to do with most of the acquisitions? Oculus? Drop.io?
- Did they grossly overpay?
- Will innovation slow to a crawl (eg. Instagram, Whatsapp)?
- Will Manus' top talent bail?
- How is it conceivable Meta couldn't build this themselves. It can't possibly have been Manus' user base they were after, can it?
- How much trouble am I in for telling my wife to sell her Meta stock two weeks ago?
The acquisition is confusing to me.
Do you even have to ask?
Yes
I hope the great product continues.