Manus, an “agentic” AI platform that launched in preview last week, is generating more hype than a Taylor Swift concert.
The head of product at Hugging Face called Manus “the most impressive AI tool I’ve ever tried.” AI policy researcher Dean Ball described Manus as the “most sophisticated computer using AI.” The official Discord server for Manus grew to over 138,000 members in just a few days, and invite codes for Manus are reportedly selling for thousands of dollars on Chinese reseller app Xianyu.
But it’s not clear the hype is justified.
excellent https://t.co/TfeV9QZ1d0
— jack (@jack) March 9, 2025
Manus wasn’t developed entirely from scratch. According to reports on social media, the platform uses a combination of existing and fine-tuned AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude and Alibaba’s Qwen, to perform tasks such as drafting research reports and analyzing financial filings.
Yet on its website, Butterfly Effect — the Chinese startup behind Manus — gives a few wild examples of what the platform supposedly can accomplish, from buying real estate to programming video games.
In a viral video on X, Yichao “Peak” Ji, a research lead for Manus, implied that the platform was superior to agentic tools such as OpenAI’s deep research and Operator. Manus outperforms deep research on a popular benchmark for general AI assistants called GAIA, Ji claimed, which probes an AI’s ability to carry out work by browsing the web, using software, and more.
“[Manus] isn’t just another chatbot or workflow,” Ji said in the video. “It’s a completely autonomous agent that bridges the gap between conception and execution […] We see it as the next paradigm of human-machine collaboration.”
But some early users say that Manus is no panacea.
Alexander Doria, the co-founder of AI startup Pleias, said in a post on X that he encountered error messages and endless loops while testing Manus. Other X users pointed out that Manus makes mistakes on factual questions and doesn’t consistently cite its work — and often misses information that’s easily found online.
