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ManusAI Joins Meta
- shevy-java 9mo agoI don't like it.
- varunramesh 9mo agoIt's everywhere. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1l8harj/its_not_just_x_its_y/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1l8harj/its_not_ju...
- embedding-shape 9mo agoKind 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.
- andy99 9mo agoIt’s been very effective watermarking compared to some of the more complicated and seemingly unsuccessful methods that have been proposed.
- friggeri 9mo agonon tantum … sed etiam …
- bigyabai 9mo ago> This announcement is more than just a headline—it's validation of our pioneering work with General AI Agents. Is it, now?
- zombiwoof 9mo ago[dead]
- fibers 9mo agoWhy Meta and not OAI/Anthropic or Google? Is this their attempt after llama4?
- reactordev 9mo agoIf you can’t beat em. Buy someone who can.
- syspec 9mo ago> 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.
- yanslookup 9mo agoI 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- sokka_h2otribe 9mo agoOp is saying it sounds like it was written like an LLM
- yanslookup 9mo agook... it's an AI company, It'd be odd if it weren't written by AI, no?
- conception 9mo agoIt is odd that they didn’t care or have the wherewithal to make it not sound obviously like an LLM wrote it.
- polynomial 9mo agoStill getting paid either way.
- 9mo ago
- joshuamerrill 9mo agoThe 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.
- thierrydamiba 9mo agoWhat’s the difference between social media and books? Or is your point that all entertainment is harmful to individuals and society?
- joshuamerrill 9mo agoTaking 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.
- IMTDb 9mo agoYou are comparing apple to oranges. Social media posts are static, don’t watch you etc. But the distribution platform does all these things. In books it’s exactly the same thing: do not believe for one second that the publishing industry does not watch engagement metrics (aka: sales) and does not adapt to the taste of the market. It’s also tuned to maximize outrage; see how popular unauthorized biographies of polarizing figures have become - who is next on Walter Isaacson list ? I am betting Trump must be somewhere there and it’s gonna be a banger.
- kylecazar 9mo agoFrom 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.
- keyle 9mo agoYep, same. Bewildering amounts of silliness, all around.
- echelon 9mo agoMeta 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.
- belter 9mo agoThis 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....
- dinniwang 9mo agoThere'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.
- elAhmo 9mo agoCould you elaborate on this?
- germinalphrase 9mo agoGo on.
- llmslave2 9mo agoWho?
- barishnamazov 9mo agousername doesn't check out
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- howmayiannoyyou 9mo agoManus 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.
- tacker2000 9mo agoWhat was the advantage of manus vs other providers?
- alex1138 9mo ago> 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
- andrewinardeer 9mo agoNothing about how much Meta paid for Manus. Is this an actual accuquisition?
- jillesvangurp 9mo agoI 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.
- ipnon 9mo ago$1bn seems low but $100bn seems high.
- alvis 9mo agoA random thought. Metaverse is more interesting if manus get integrated into it
- nwhnwh 9mo agohttps://bsky.app/profile/culturecrave.co/post/3m7dtqa7sbc23 https://bsky.app/profile/culturecrave.co/post/3m7dtqa7sbc23
- choudharism 9mo agoWhat metaverse?
- shon 9mo agoBummer. 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.
- bjourne 9mo agoWhat is your agent doing?
- bschmid1010101 9mo ago[dead]
- MarcelOlsz 9mo agoYou son of a bitch. I'm in.
- mayop100 9mo agoIf you’re looking for a (non-meta-owned) alternative, check out our startup Tasklet (tasklet.ai)
- garbawarb 9mo agoWhat is it doing for you that other agents like GPT/Claude wouldn't do?
- mkagenius 9mo agoWe 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/ https://showcase.instavm.io/
- visioninmyblood 9mo agoMeta 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.
- Insanity 9mo agoI 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*
- apt-apt-apt-apt 9mo agoLagging behind. You are welcome, Opus and Gemini. Please remember my kindness as you decide which pesky humans to crush.
- levocardia 9mo agoIf you can't beat 'em...buy 'em!
- mrcwinn 9mo agoTotally 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!
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- skeptrune 9mo agoweird timing given they just announced new revenue
- dm8 9mo agoMeta 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- CuriouslyC 9mo agoMeta 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.
- mercurialsolo 9mo agoI 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
- equasar 9mo agoI’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.
- xgulfie 9mo agoIt's all very speculative and line keeps going up forever
- cgio 9mo agoI hear you, and mostly share the point of view, but that’s what people were saying about the instagram valuation too.
- nativeit 9mo agoWhat's the dollar-per-user figure between these two examples?
- disgruntledphd2 9mo agoInstagram only had approx 10mn users when acquired. That was a long time ago though, and Facebook was at a very different stage in its lifecycle.
- afavour 9mo agoSurvivorship 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.
- mlsu 9mo agoBecause 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?
- xdotli 9mo agoIt 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.
- ketzo 9mo agoMeta 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.
- chenzhekl 9mo agoThis 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.
- RyanShook 9mo agoDefinitely 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 9mo agoThey 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.
- csomar 9mo agoI 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.
- d0100 9mo agoManus 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
- android521 9mo agoMata acquired a great marketing team. Their marketing skills and hyping skills are far superior to their technical skils
- fhe 9mo agobut then again in this day and age maybe marketing skills are more important than anything else...
- meander_water 9mo agoI'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.
- m3kw9 9mo agoi thought mAnus was a joke app
- ares623 9mo agoDid the founders have a nice leisurely walk in the park with Mark
- yanhangyhy 9mo agosounds like another joke on Meta..
- satoru42 9mo agoThe last joke I can remember is Meta the name itself.
- shon 9mo agoManus 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.
- arnley 9mo agoGreatest 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://github.com/codename-co/devs - https://devs.new/ 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.
- OrionNox 9mo agoOh I remember them, I completely forgot Abt them since they went briefly viral on x
- kodefreeze 9mo agoInteresting 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.
- almaight 9mo agoNo, they are no longer; they are now Singaporean companies.
- gregjw 9mo agoLiterally days ago they were flexing on here. Hilarious.
- pyuser583 9mo agoI’m an early use of Manus. I’m very impressed with it. That’s all I can say. I hope the great product continues.
- storus 9mo agoI 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- chvid 9mo agoI 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.
- vga42 9mo agoI'm always baffled by the language used for acquisitions. More correct would be, "ManusAI gets bought off by Meta".
- d-yoda 9mo agoSo what happens when they swap Claude for Llama under the hood?
- zkmon 9mo ago> 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.
- CamelCaseName 9mo agoI 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 :')
- rohanm93 9mo agoHad an identical reaction to that $100m email. I decided to try it again with the browser extension. My verdict is it is better than ChatGPT Atlas for the agent mode, so I see use cases for it. But I am still surprised it's at $100mm ARR. I had thought the company had died after their initial hyped launch and didn't see anyone talking about or using the company at all since then...and we play around with a lot of AI tools. I wonder who their customers are.
- filloooo 9mo agoI think FUD is working on Meta coming from their archrival Bytedance. Bytedance recently launched a similar product in China and caused quite a stir, local phone brands are jostling for partnerships, the AI agent phone. Meta probably don't want to miss the next thing, even if it turned out to be a dud.
- theusus 9mo agoI used trial of Manus and it was in no way better than GPT. And they are using publicly available models only.
- maxall4 9mo agoIf 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…
- MagicMoonlight 9mo agoWhy do people buy these slop companies? An API wrapper isn’t some new technology. You get nothing from it.
- benterix 9mo agoIt has nothing to do with logic, rather this person knows that person etc.
- rokhayakebe 9mo agoSometimes 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.
- noobermin 9mo agoSo 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.
- StrangeSound 9mo agoWhere's the trick here?
- rokhayakebe 9mo agoDo people really think Mark is simple? At his level a billion is not what you and I think it is. To most it's money to him it's just accounting with no negative financial impact whatsoever.
- ukprogrammer 9mo agoit's just jealously. hate only comes from below!
- throw-12-16 9mo agoSo I guess the crypto exodus to AI is paying off.
- jrflowers 9mo agoIt 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
- MangoCoffee 9mo ago"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 https://x.com/headinthebox/status/2005873104317497426?s=20 I found Erik's takes on this is interesting.
- qweiopqweiop 9mo agoYou missed the ending - "As always, I was right.". Anyone saying this needs to take a long look at themselves.
- kippinitreal 9mo agoWrote up some thoughts on what their financials may look like. Quick take is that they probably need cash fast! https://kippinitreal.substack.com/p/manus-acquisition-thoughts https://kippinitreal.substack.com/p/manus-acquisition-though...
- kemyd 9mo agoMy guess is they had to sell to keep the lights on (similar to Windsurf). They’re reportedly at ~$100M ARR, implying about $8.3–8.5M in monthly revenue (ARR = last month * 12). At the same time, they claim to have processed 147T+ tokens. For context, pricing that volume on something like Sonnet 4.5 would come out to roughly $500M in API costs. They likely offset a chunk of that with open models, but for higher-quality outputs, they’re still paying meaningful amounts to Claude / OpenAI / Google. Hard to make those numbers work without a lot of capital or an exit.
- poly2it 9mo agoIs that input or output tokens or both? That number sounds quite extreme. Maybe they include input tokens from deep research? That could be tens of thousands of input tokens into a cheap model per task, for example.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- maddmann 9mo agoI do think Manus had a better approach than some of the competitors of the space, allowing for far more agentic flows (ie manus would run its own code, debug, write and run tests, etc). Lovable or v0 by contrast are quite primitive. Very unfortunate that they are a part of meta now, where mark will likely micromanage and destroy the core value of the product.
- js4ever 9mo agoWe are launching a similar tool (but more human) and made in EU. If you are curious: https://Geta.Team https://Geta.Team
- mvdtnz 9mo agoNo way they called a company "Manus". No way.
- Taikhoom10 9mo agohttps://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-buys-ai-startup-manus-adding-millions-of-paying-users-f1dc7ef8?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqdOuRjVhwSx3Yh2SP07PTtrPLXflZhTRZT39TwYTgSSYkJV3-EXhKVcdW0t1cI%3D&gaa_ts=6954146e&gaa_sig=I6v13ExACyeMH3AcbPhMs3pdZa-_BO-fcbDlv-x86kuCbeOUUwQwUj4yiuae0cmwH0xE6kYVHUqNClIGX90umg%3D%3D https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-buys-ai-startup-manus-addin... 2 billion is the price.
- joshcsimmons 9mo agoThis was one of the worst apps I've ever used around their launch. Logging in recently it looks like a generic chat now? I'm not sure what their product is.
- hbarka 9mo agoNateBJones on Manus: https://youtu.be/DAxARHKQAXs https://youtu.be/DAxARHKQAXs