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.
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.
Their wiki says they have ARR over 100m. Pretty impressive for a product that's 9 months old. 20x multiple is high sure, but hardly seems like friends giving friends money for ... reasons
Manus and Kortix seem to be rare in the way how you interact with them. It looks like that every "chat" is running its own Linux box.
And instead of chat, you can define the results form - table, markdown text, pdf etc. I have tried it and Manus seems to deliver more organised results.
Should be the value of transaction so high? Idk.
But I remember WhatsApp situation… feels the same.
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...)
Yet the new AI startups I'm seeing are only offering terrible deals to early hires who could improve their chances of a nice exit.
In this crazy environment -- in which money is flying around over AI much like the dotcom boom, but startup founders are using the last-decade playbook of not sharing the wealth with early hires -- I'm starting to think that smart AI job-seekers need to either:
* get hired by a company that is willing to invest in hiring (i.e., reasonable salary and/or meaningful equity); or
* build some AI application IP at their kitchen table, to sell to a company that's flush with cash, and wants to invest in AI acquisitions.
Bubble aside, it feels AI is by nature a less democratic tech.
The need for stupid amounts of data and hardware make it less likely that a really talented person can outcompete companies from their basement. That probably influences culture.
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)
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....
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I remember this company from the very beginning. I was very confused by them, but just the other day they sent an email saying they had hit $100MM ARR and $125MM run rate.
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
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.
"I left Meta because I made a bet that models were going to commoditized and the value would be in products on top of models, but MetaMate and GenAI were highly politicized sucking up all oxygen in the room."
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.
It's not ready for orchestration yet, but most fundamental layers are already working great.
Create your agents using the LLMs of your choosing, directly from your smartphone of you want full privacy, and with no ads, no paywall, no sign up required.
Manus was ahead of its time. But the directions are parting ways.
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.
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.
Sometimes I feel people are just jealous. If Meta is so ready to throw money why don't these people just build something and sell it to them for billions in 6 months. Join the winning side instead of complaining.
So I have a position that I don't think you'll like. I feel like making money is a means to a better life. Generally, we as a society should seek value creation that actually improves society and increases our productivity. If all you want to do is basically trick rich people out of their money, I don't think that is the world I want to live in.
Yes this is an argument from morality fundamentally. I guess I want to live in a society that rewards being productive and making others better. Not essentially theft a step or two removed.
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.
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.
Books are a medium that encourages literacy and helps understand others. Social media, in its current iteration, discourages curiosity and heightens conflict with others.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is nice that most people have a good grasp of Latin vocabulary and immediately recognize the word for “hand” because otherwise you’d probably get questions like “is the name of your product being eighty percent ‘anus’ intentional?” and so on
If I read one more article/press release/whatever with such clumsy use of antithesis, I’m going to go insane. I have no problem with using AI to write if it is done well, but this…
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?
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.
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/
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
Their wiki says they have ARR over 100m. Pretty impressive for a product that's 9 months old. 20x multiple is high sure, but hardly seems like friends giving friends money for ... reasons
It really does seem like friends giving friends a piece of the pie before it all blows up.
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Manus and Kortix seem to be rare in the way how you interact with them. It looks like that every "chat" is running its own Linux box.
And instead of chat, you can define the results form - table, markdown text, pdf etc. I have tried it and Manus seems to deliver more organised results.
Should be the value of transaction so high? Idk.
But I remember WhatsApp situation… feels the same.
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Go on.
3 replies →
You should elaborate on this more.
Please continue
Aquisitions so fast it is income not capital gains.
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...)
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Yep, same. Bewildering amounts of silliness, all around.
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.
Yet the new AI startups I'm seeing are only offering terrible deals to early hires who could improve their chances of a nice exit.
In this crazy environment -- in which money is flying around over AI much like the dotcom boom, but startup founders are using the last-decade playbook of not sharing the wealth with early hires -- I'm starting to think that smart AI job-seekers need to either:
* get hired by a company that is willing to invest in hiring (i.e., reasonable salary and/or meaningful equity); or
* build some AI application IP at their kitchen table, to sell to a company that's flush with cash, and wants to invest in AI acquisitions.
Bubble aside, it feels AI is by nature a less democratic tech.
The need for stupid amounts of data and hardware make it less likely that a really talented person can outcompete companies from their basement. That probably influences culture.
3 replies →
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)
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....
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.
Mata acquired a great marketing team. Their marketing skills and hyping skills are far superior to their technical skils
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?
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but then again in this day and age maybe marketing skills are more important than anything else...
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It’s because the Meta brand is poison.
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.
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.
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.
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".
I never heard of manus so I clicked the About Us page. Wow, it is insufferable.
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.
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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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
It's everywhere. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1l8harj/its_not_ju...
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.
It’s been very effective watermarking compared to some of the more complicated and seemingly unsuccessful methods that have been proposed.
non tantum … sed etiam …
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.
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?
And the reason is all of you dumping cash into the market no matter what because John Bogle said so half a century 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.
I hear you, and mostly share the point of view, but that’s what people were saying about the instagram valuation too.
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.
What's the dollar-per-user figure between these two examples?
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It's all very speculative and line keeps going up forever
> 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 :-)
The crypto bros switched over to AI.
I remember this company from the very beginning. I was very confused by them, but just the other day they sent an email saying they had hit $100MM ARR and $125MM run rate.
Who is paying? No clue, must be big in China.
I skipped going to their hackathon :')
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
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.
They launched March 2025. It’s great that’s considered a long time ago.
I used trial of Manus and it was in no way better than GPT. And they are using publicly available models only.
"I left Meta because I made a bet that models were going to commoditized and the value would be in products on top of models, but MetaMate and GenAI were highly politicized sucking up all oxygen in the room."
- Erik Meijer
https://x.com/headinthebox/status/2005873104317497426?s=20
I found Erik's takes on this is interesting.
You missed the ending - "As always, I was right.". Anyone saying this needs to take a long look at themselves.
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.
Greatest products with such an impact on people should not be behind closed doors. And delegating complex tasks to AI is clearly what's next.
That's one of the reasons I'm building out in the open:
- https://github.com/codename-co/devs - https://devs.new/
It's not ready for orchestration yet, but most fundamental layers are already working great.
Create your agents using the LLMs of your choosing, directly from your smartphone of you want full privacy, and with no ads, no paywall, no sign up required.
Manus was ahead of its time. But the directions are parting ways.
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.
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.
Sometimes I feel people are just jealous. If Meta is so ready to throw money why don't these people just build something and sell it to them for billions in 6 months. Join the winning side instead of complaining.
So I have a position that I don't think you'll like. I feel like making money is a means to a better life. Generally, we as a society should seek value creation that actually improves society and increases our productivity. If all you want to do is basically trick rich people out of their money, I don't think that is the world I want to live in.
Yes this is an argument from morality fundamentally. I guess I want to live in a society that rewards being productive and making others better. Not essentially theft a step or two removed.
Where's the trick here?
it's just jealously.
hate only comes from below!
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.
That’s why I’m building https://roselabs.ai!
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!!
What’s the difference between social media and books?
Or is your point that all entertainment is harmful to individuals and society?
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.
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Books are a medium that encourages literacy and helps understand others. Social media, in its current iteration, discourages curiosity and heightens conflict with others.
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
>What’s the difference between social media and books?
I am struggling to believe that this was asked in good faith.
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Books aren't harassing kids!
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things I like are good. things I don't like are bad.
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.
I'm always baffled by the language used for acquisitions. More correct would be, "ManusAI gets bought off by Meta".
> 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.
So what happens when they swap Claude for Llama under the hood?
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.
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.
So I guess the crypto exodus to AI is paying off.
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.
Lagging behind. You are welcome, Opus and Gemini. Please remember my kindness as you decide which pesky humans to crush.
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*
If you can't beat 'em...buy 'em!
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.
Nothing about how much Meta paid for Manus. Is this an actual accuquisition?
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.
$1bn seems low but $100bn seems high.
I don't like it.
Oh I remember them, I completely forgot Abt them since they went briefly viral on x
Literally days ago they were flexing on here. Hilarious.
It is nice that most people have a good grasp of Latin vocabulary and immediately recognize the word for “hand” because otherwise you’d probably get questions like “is the name of your product being eighty percent ‘anus’ intentional?” and so on
Did the founders have a nice leisurely walk in the park with Mark
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.
No, they are no longer; they are now Singaporean companies.
A random thought. Metaverse is more interesting if manus get integrated into it
https://bsky.app/profile/culturecrave.co/post/3m7dtqa7sbc23
What metaverse?
Why Meta and not OAI/Anthropic or Google? Is this their attempt after llama4?
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.
If I read one more article/press release/whatever with such clumsy use of antithesis, I’m going to go insane. I have no problem with using AI to write if it is done well, but this…
> 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.
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?
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.
Op is saying it sounds like it was written like an LLM
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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.
> 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.
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.
Why do people buy these slop companies? An API wrapper isn’t some new technology. You get nothing from it.
It has nothing to do with logic, rather this person knows that person etc.
If you can’t beat em. Buy someone who can.
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.
What is it doing for you that other agents like GPT/Claude wouldn't do?
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/
What is your agent doing?
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!
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If you’re looking for a (non-meta-owned) alternative, check out our startup Tasklet (tasklet.ai)
Who?
username doesn't check out
> This announcement is more than just a headline—it's validation of our pioneering work with General AI Agents.
Is it, now?
weird timing given they just announced new revenue
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!
i thought mAnus was a joke app
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.
What was the advantage of manus vs other providers?
> 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
sounds like another joke on Meta..
The last joke I can remember is Meta the name itself.
[dead]
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.