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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
by chenzhekl 9mo ago
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.
- 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...
- koakuma-chan 9mo agoI have never heard about Manus before that post about them reaching 100M ARR or something. Where did they advertise?
- zingar 9mo agoAI influencers on YouTube were going wild with demos for about 2 weeks around the middle of this year. It was enough to get me to sign up to the manus wait list but by the time they told me I was in I’d realised how superficial the recommendations from the YouTube crowd were. Also I’d seen a few waves of hype like that and realised how bogus the content was.
- Aqua0 9mo agoThey're promoting it on Chinese social media. Although those media outlets are some AI-related self-publishers
- ares623 9mo agoIt’s because the Meta brand is poison.
- stingraycharles 9mo agoHow 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?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- dheera 9mo agoDue diligence is a joke in the first place, nobody actually does anything these days beyond flip through some Powerpoints. They think their hockey stick graphs are some diligence but in reality every graph is engineered to be a hockey stick. The vast majority of whether a deal is good or bad has nothing to do with anything you could be duly diligent about. It has everything do with whether the founders are clever executors to capture market, and the luck of the company in the coming years, the latter you cannot predict.
- imwally 9mo agoI never heard of manus so I clicked the About Us page. Wow, it is insufferable.
- uberdru 9mo agoI 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.
- vintermann 9mo agoI guess if you live a highly leveraged life, you have better chances of success, but if you die, five other people die too. Not sure it's a good idea.
- bigcat12345678 9mo agoI 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
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- TigerHix 9mo agoI 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- yuzhun 9mo agoI am also Chinese and AI user. Manus is excellent, and it's hard to find a rival when it comes to making PPTs. The effect of wild search is exaggerated. The hype from official accounts is one thing, and the overwhelming scam comments on social media are another; neither is accurate. It has been almost a year. If Manus were really as simple as just getting Open Manus up and running, we should have seen many similar products. But unfortunately, there's only one Manus.
- chvid 9mo agoFrom wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_(AI_agent) 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".