Since general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in China either, where it was developed by Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. It’s made its way into the global conversation, with influential voices in tech, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Hugging Face product lead Victor Mustar, praising its performance. Some have even dubbed it “the second DeepSeek,” drawing comparisons to the earlier AI model that took the industry by surprise—both for its unexpected capabilities and its origin. Manus claims to be the world’s first general AI agent—leveraging multiple AI models (such as Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and fine-tuned versions of Alibaba’s open-source Qwen), and various independently operating agents to act autonomously on a wide range of tasks. (This is different from AI chatbots, including DeepSeek, that are based on a single large language model family and are primarily designed for conversational interactions.) Despite all the hype, very few people have had a chance to use it. Currently, under 1% of the users on the waitlist have received an invite code. (It’s unclear how many people are on this waitlist, but for a sense of how much interest there is, Manus’s Discord channel has more than 186,000 members.)

Full review : How does the new Chinese autonomous artificial intelligence agent really fare in the real world?