Between Apple and Meta, I think it was a pretty close call in terms of which Big Tech company had the worse 2025 when it came to AI. Both had to completely overhaul their approaches after embarrassments. But only one has had to spend billions, let alone tens of billions, and perhaps hundreds of billions to correct the mistakes – at least so far. And so Meta clearly wanted to end their no-good-very-bad-year on a high note. As Angel Au-Yeung, Raffaele Huang, and Kate Clark report for WSJ: Meta has agreed to acquire AI startup Manus, a Singapore-based company with Chinese founders that conducts deep research and performs other tasks for paying users. Meta is closing the deal at more than $2 billion, according to people familiar with the acquisition. Manus was seeking a fresh round of fundraising with a valuation of $2 billion when Meta approached the startup, some of the people said.

Full analysis : Meta just bought into the enterprise market with its Manus deal, which may eventually help it expand into cloud offerings like those of its Big Tech peers.