Chinese AI ‘Manus’ went viral like DeepSeek, but can it compete with ChatGPT’s AI agents?

DeepSeek went viral a few weeks ago, shocking the US tech world and tanking the stock market in the process. The Chinese AI firm surprised everyone with an AI reasoning chatbot as good as ChatGPT o1, but which was trained for a fraction of the cost.

Since then, we've learned that hardware will still play a key role in developing advanced (frontier) AI like ChatGPT, but that software optimizations can also help. Also, we learned DeepSeek might have copied ChatGPT outputs as a shortcut to speed up training.

DeepSeek going viral also made the world aware that Chinese AI firms shouldn't be ruled out despite their inability to purchase the latest chips from Nvidia and other US chip makers. Since the DeepSeek release, we've already seen a few impressive text-to-video AI models out of China that aim to compete with Sora. Some might even outperform OpenAI's model.

The latest viral AI out of China is called Manus, from a company called The Butterfly Effect. Manus isn't your regular ChatGPT or DeepSeek rival. It's supposed to be an AI agent that can code on your behalf or browse the web for you. We already have such agents from Anthropic and OpenAI.

OpenAI released two AI agents already, Operator and Deep Research. But only the latter is widely available to premium ChatGPT users. You still need to be a ChatGPT Pro user to access Operator, while Deep Research is available on the Plus plan.

Back to Magnus; I saw news of it making the rounds on social media over the weekend. Apparently, the AI does well in tests, and people are in a hurry to use it. Invites are running low, and they might be selling for thousands of dollars online. That's according to TechCrunch, which tested the AI.

However, the Magnus hype seems to be unwarranted. Magnus is still in beta and failed miserably at most of the tasks it was given.

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