Each month brings another groundbreaking development in AI, only for it to be swiftly overtaken by the next. Manus, launched by the Chinese tech firm Monica.im, claims it’s not just hype, though. Unlike the chatbot-style assistants we’ve grown accustomed to, Manus is an autonomous AI capable of independently performing complex tasks without requiring human prompts.
Manus’s capabilities, at least as demonstrated in its promotional video, are impressive. It swiftly processes dozens of job applications, identifying the ideal candidate; conducts sophisticated financial analysis, complete with an interactive, data-driven website; and rapidly generates detailed reports – all by scouring data on its own, generating its own commands, and executing them without human oversight.
Given its Chinese origins, comparisons to DeepSeek were inevitable. Readers may recall how, last month, the Chinese AI reasoning model briefly sent Silicon Valley into a frenzy. Likewise, Manus is already drawing similar praise: the head of product at the computing company Hugging Face called it ‘the most impressive AI tool I’ve ever tried’.
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