Recently, a Chinese AI agent platform called Manus has garnered significant online attention. Since its preview launch last week, it has rapidly attracted a large user base, with Hugging Face's product lead calling it "the most impressive AI tool I've ever seen." Simultaneously, AI policy researcher Dean Ball described Manus as "the most sophisticated computer AI." Manus's official Discord server amassed over 138,000 members in just a few days, and invitation codes were even being resold for thousands of dollars on the Chinese secondhand platform Xianyu.

But is all this hype justified?

Manus isn't entirely built from scratch. Social media reports suggest the platform combines several existing and fine-tuned AI models, including Anthropic's Claude and Alibaba's Qwen, enabling tasks like writing research reports and analyzing financial documents. However, on Manus's official website, its Chinese startup developer, Monica, boasts seemingly exaggerated capabilities, such as buying real estate and programming video games.

In a video that sparked considerable discussion, Manus's head of research, Yichao "Peak" Ji, claimed Manus outperformed other tools, such as OpenAI's deep research, in a popular AI assistant benchmark, GAIA. Ji stated, "[Manus] is not just a chatbot or workflow; it's a fully autonomous agent that bridges the gap between ideation and execution."

However, some early users have reported less-than-stellar experiences. Alexander Doria, co-founder of AI startup Pleias, reported encountering erroneous information and infinite loops during testing on X (formerly Twitter). Other users noted Manus frequently makes factual errors, inconsistently cites its work, and often omits easily findable online information.

Despite these user reports, Manus's popularity remains high. One contributing factor is the exclusivity created by the scarcity of invitations.

It's worth noting that Monica hasn't developed its own proprietary model, instead leveraging existing ones—a contrast to the Chinese AI company DeepSeek. While much of DeepSeek's technology is publicly available, Monica hasn't yet fully opened its technology.

Monica states that Manus is still in early access and is working to expand computing capacity and address reported issues. However, currently, Manus's technological promises appear to fall short of its marketing.

Key Points:

🔍 Manus is a highly publicized Chinese AI agent platform that has rapidly gained a large user base.

💻 Users have reported various technical issues with Manus, including inaccurate information and incomplete functionality.

📉 Manus's popularity is closely tied to its development background and media hype, but its performance has yet to meet expectations.