[chenzhekl]

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]

Mata acquired a great marketing team. Their marketing skills and hyping skills are far superior to their technical skils

[stingraycharles]

How does due diligence work for these type of acquisitions, do they even have one? What do they think they’re buying? A team? Technology? A brand?

[fhe]

but then again in this day and age maybe marketing skills are more important than anything else...

[ares623]

It’s because the Meta brand is poison.

[bigcat12345678]

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]

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.

[oefrha]

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.

[zingar]

> they attribute their success to morally inferior conduct

I’m not seeing accusations of morally inferior conduct here. Tech people like to dunk on marketing people no matter where in the world they are.

[tensor]

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.

[danieltanfh95]

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.

[chvid]

From wikipedia:

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".

[RyanShook]

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]

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.

[d0100]

Manus is pretty "big" in the entrepreneur crowd here in Brazil

When it came out is was very good, and had much better results than ChatGPT

[csomar]

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.

[imwally]

I never heard of manus so I clicked the About Us page. Wow, it is insufferable.

[uberdru]

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.