From 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.
There'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.
Their wiki says they have ARR over 100m. Pretty impressive for a product that's 9 months old. 20x multiple is high sure, but hardly seems like friends giving friends money for ... reasons
Cool, sounds like you discovered a life hack. Build something that can get $100m ARR while losing money, sell it, become billionaire.
Build something that can get 1k users. No in fact, build something that can get 100 users!
No offense, but you sounds like someone who has never actually had to build a business or product. It's hard to build something people use, even if its free. This isn't moviepass concept where they're literally selling $10 for $5, but even that's hard to sell! There are plenty of companies that try and fail to get tracking with moviepass economics.
If you are having problems attracting users, even when free, consider that maybe your product doesn't offer much value to them. I say this as someone who has bootstrapped a 7 figure software business.
Well, it helps I don't care about getting to 9 figures. As long as I make enough to live a comfortable lifestyle, I'm not going to sacrifice my family or my sanity to become some kind of unstable unicorn.
Manus and Kortix seem to be rare in the way how you interact with them. It looks like that every "chat" is running its own Linux box.
And instead of chat, you can define the results form - table, markdown text, pdf etc. I have tried it and Manus seems to deliver more organised results.
Should be the value of transaction so high? Idk.
But I remember WhatsApp situation… feels the same.
I think both aquisitions have little to do with the product, and make a lot of sense when you look at the numbers and broader strategy.
WhatsApp had a very clear value at the time of aquisition. It had 450 million users, growth of over 1 million users a day, and was in direct competition with one of Facebook's main products (Messenger) [1].
They did pay $4 billion cash + $15 billion in shares, which is a lot, but overall a not too unreasonable $8 cash + $33 in shares per user to join forces with it's biggest messaging competitor. It not only covered a flank, but catapulted Facebook to own worldwide private messaging overnight.
Manus apparently has "millions of paying users" already [2]. although Manus hasn't been around very long, it's developed by a company that's been around since 2022 [3]. Millions of paying users sounds like a good way for Meta to set foot on the consumer AI product space, which it doesn't seem to be capturing too quickly [4]. It's also based in Singapore and has a lot of Chinese ties, so there might be some strategy there.
The data labeler has been instructed to build products, so he splurges on a company, which, unlike 95% of AI startups, at least has a functioning website.
Consider the possibility that the people who make these decisions aren't actually all that smart and are easily manipulated by marketing and the sycophants/impostors they surround themselves with.
Who are you in this scenario though? Are you ManusAI getting bought for a giant pile of money? Are you a vendor that supplies Meta for their VR hardware that's getting paid in money? Are you an employee at Meta getting paid in money and Meta shares to build the Metaverse? Are you a shareholder of Meta who's stock is up? Like, sure, we can sit back and laugh at no legs, but Meta spent money they had on a thing they wanted to do. Sure, it didn't pan out, like that time I tried to pick up scuba diving, but when you have that much money, you can afford to try things that don't work. What's better, to try and fail, or never try because someone might make fun of you? If I just sold a company for half a billion, you could call me all the names you want, I wouldn't be able to hear you over the engines of my private fighter jet.
I understand what they are arguing, but they are just lobbing insinuations at the crowd. I (perhaps wrongly) assumed they had specific insight into the people and relationships inside the transaction that could be shared.
Capital gains are a form of income, and have nothing to do with speed (long-term capital gains are distinguished from short-term capital gains by speed, but...)
Some countries tax will diffferentiate income and capital gains, tax based on speed, and consider capital gains income if you are systematically making money e.g. buying and selling stock multiple times per year even if holding for a while.
This 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....
Yet the new AI startups I'm seeing are only offering terrible deals to early hires who could improve their chances of a nice exit.
In this crazy environment -- in which money is flying around over AI much like the dotcom boom, but startup founders are using the last-decade playbook of not sharing the wealth with early hires -- I'm starting to think that smart AI job-seekers need to either:
* get hired by a company that is willing to invest in hiring (i.e., reasonable salary and/or meaningful equity); or
* build some AI application IP at their kitchen table, to sell to a company that's flush with cash, and wants to invest in AI acquisitions.
Bubble aside, it feels AI is by nature a less democratic tech.
The need for stupid amounts of data and hardware make it less likely that a really talented person can outcompete companies from their basement. That probably influences culture.
True, but I think there's kitchen table opportunity in applications that don't need to do a big training, and that have tractable inferencing requirements.
The challenges I see are: (1) there's a lot of competition in the gold rush; (2) there's a lot of noise of AI slop implementations, including by anyone who sees your demo.
You also can fine tuned LLMs. For that, you don't need big money. You also can pick up a fine tuned LLM and go from there and make it better ( for your use case)
You've stumbled upon the same trade Matt Levine has been pointing out for a few months now.
If you're good at AI, you could get hired at a top-tier company for 1-2M annual comp, and expect to stay there for at most five (5) years. That's a maximum of 10M pre-tax, and you'd be still on the receiving end of employment gauntlet.
Alternatively you could spin up an AI startup, and get acquired for 75M+ in less than 2 years.
In less surprising news, Matt has pointed out a number of deals that look quite a bit like that throughout 2025.
Interesting. That sounds like the trade for a very credentialed AI person. For random hackers, it's a little different...
There's the job ($250K+ in a VHCOLA, and probably worthless stock options), or their own startup.
I'd distinguish the kitchen table bootstrap startup, from the courting funding and playing the VC game startup.
The bootstrapped startup lets you do whatever product or tech demo you can do, and only that, and then eventually you have to deal with M&A courtship.
The VC track startup, you have to focus on jumping through the hoops of all sorts modern VC investors throughout the process. And among their criteria will be things like what your socioeconomic class is, and which school did you go to, bro. But it's otherwise easy, because you just have to go through the motions and burn VC money and hit their milestones while the hype wave musical chairs music is playing, and worst case is that you're a serial entrepreneur.
Either kind of startup is valid, but bootstrapped could have you spending most of your time on actual AI product work, if you can scope it to be viable with your resources. But you have to work smart and energetically, and worst case is that you run out of personal and revenue money, and then have to do a bunch of job interviewing to beg for a job from the previous category of founder.
This reminds me of when YC seemed to be a response to the dotcom boom environment, a bit "by hackers, for hackers", to help hackers start Internet businesses. Rather than mostly only the non-hackers starting dotcoms (such as with affluent family angel investors and connections). Or rather than hackers having to spend their energy jumping through a lot of hoops, while dealing with disingenuous and exploitative finance bro types.
have had 2 outsider estimates (1 public, 1 not, both more well informed than avg HNer) that acquisition was ~$4B worth, def not play money.
i just released the full AIE workshop covering Manus' product surface area if anyone is also out of the loop and wants to catch up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz0-brt56L8
(no vested interest am just friends w Ivan who works there. also as a singaporean i guess this is a small W for the Singapore AI scene)
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.
Due 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.
AI 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.
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.
> 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.
> People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing went viral to demonstrate the point.
I tried openmanus and I frowned at openmanus team's intentionally attention grabbing gimmick after manus' overnight success, and open manus does not work at the moment.
> People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing
This is not a good sign but may not be as terrible as it used to be: it seems like as soon as one idea makes money someone else is able to reproduce it fast. The barrier for defensibility is so much higher than before.
I 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.
Manus attempted to ride the wave of DeepSeek and hired an army of influencers inside and outside of China, especially inside, to hype it up as the second coming of DeepSeek, even though they didn’t target the Chinese domestic market (as you correctly pointed out). IIRC it quickly became a joke in about two weeks after it became obvious that they were a thin layer on top of Claude and all marketing. I don’t know how they maneuvered into the current acquisition (feasting on Zuck’s fomo?), but saying “they always have great reputation in the AI industry” is laughable. This kind of garbage damages your reputation by loose association, you should be mad at them, not commenters.
Edit: Actually, the announcement doesn’t say anything about valuation, so it’s not even clear it’s a successful exit.
Riding a wave is fine. Stealing someone else’s clout and falsely advertising your product is not. This applies to every other shitty AI company with little to offer on top of someone else’s foundational model, regardless of origin country. It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.
Are they the only grifters? No, not by a long shot. Are they the only ones ridiculed? No.
> It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.
I still felt this baseless.
Manus at the time is break through result. Are they egregious in advertising they being deepseek moment? I don't know think so. Is it a marketing ploy? Yes, but it's far less egregious than any normal AI startup, like cluely.
Comparing to deepseek or qwen, heavy lifting what? Manus is built on Claude at the time it's doing egregious marketing, how can it be considered heavy lifted by unrelated products. What's the point you want to make?
It has nothing to do with being Chinese. The fact that the founder with previous connections is exactly what people are suggesting is a problem.
I think China will beat the US in AI but absolutely not using this silicon valley style bullshit model of valuation. Companies like the one that produced Deepseek using cutting edge academic research to do more with vastly less are hat will win. New algorithms will beat money. And the US has abandoned science, and thus it will lose.
If it has nothing to do with being Chinese founded, then why it stated obviously baseless statements without objections until myself pointed out the facts. I mean, manus is top tier by any measure in the startup scene, and someone just say that it's a joke, then sane people's immediate reaction should be asking why, right?
Why suddenly it becomes automatically accepted, other than being a Chinese founded startup, tell me, what else can prompts such mental inconsistency?
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]
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Doesn't sound like a "company focused almost entirely on marketing".
They 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Kind 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.
I’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.
Because 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?
Survivorship 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.
I 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
It was more of a timing thing, they offered 'deep research' like behaviors a long time before they were offered to standard customers of the primary ai providers.
My 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.
Is 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.
I 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.
Had 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.
Manus 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.
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.
It 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.
Meta 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.
The 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.
Taking 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.
You 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.
Anybody who has meaningfully engaged with short-form dynamically adapted video content and read a book can EASILY tell the difference. It is Morphine vs Fentanyl
If we just take this idea in good faith one could make the point that social media and books are more similiar than they appear. They both end up in escapism. They both can teach or entertain. They both are mostly anti-social.
The difference in form increases effectiveness but in the end they are a tool that is designed to escape reality.
Books are a medium that encourages literacy and helps understand others. Social media, in its current iteration, discourages curiosity and heightens conflict with others.
I'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.
"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."
I 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.
Meta 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.
I 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.
Manus 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?
It 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
Sometimes 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.
So 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.
Do 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.
I 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.
I 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.
This 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.
Meta needed consumer product along with foundational model. Manus gives them consumer product now. Pure speculation - must be 5B+ acquisition given their revenue run rate.
Totally 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!
Perhaps "our PR team is a prompt" is what they mean to convey? Or "let's make this obviously AI so more people comment pointing that out" is their social media strategy?
Since LLMs emulate human writing, what is it about that sentence that gives away that it was written by an LLM rather than human? Haven't we seen plenty of hollow-sounding self-aggrandizing marketing copies like this one pre-LLMs? What is it that is wrong with this sentence?
It sounds like corporate meaningless drivel. Everyone is dogging on it because it's no different than when startups of yore would say "making the world a better place." As if the meaningless platitude was some incantation you had to whisper or the funding wouldn't close.
Would that be odd? AI companies are still staffed by people, and large announcements like acquihires certainly feel like they could use a slightly more human touch if they truly mean a lot to the company.
Eh if anyone is all in on AI and it replacing human writing it would be an AI company
But then that means if you're a PR or communications person working at this startup (or at Meta?) your job is not secure and that your days there are probably numbered, which I'm sure is great for morale...
To anyone who isn't deep in the AI hype space it reads like satire to include such an obvious AI tell but I think it's a positive in the eyes of the AI hype world. It's like how anyone not a lizard is repulsed by LinkedIn speak and yet it dominates the platform.
I saw this in a past hype cycle. What happens is that it becomes a "performative" art in an echo-chamber for startups, startup founders, VCs. Performative meaning doing things one thinks others want to see rather than when it makes sense.
Management is quizzing their tech teams on injecting agents into their workflows whatever the f that means. Some of these big companies will acquire startups in the space so they are not left behind on the hype-train. So, they can claim to have agentic talent on their teams.
Those of us who have seen this movie play out know the ending.
If 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…
We 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/
I 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.
From 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.
There'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.
Their wiki says they have ARR over 100m. Pretty impressive for a product that's 9 months old. 20x multiple is high sure, but hardly seems like friends giving friends money for ... reasons
It’s not so hard to get ARR if you don’t care about margin.
Cool, sounds like you discovered a life hack. Build something that can get $100m ARR while losing money, sell it, become billionaire.
Build something that can get 1k users. No in fact, build something that can get 100 users!
No offense, but you sounds like someone who has never actually had to build a business or product. It's hard to build something people use, even if its free. This isn't moviepass concept where they're literally selling $10 for $5, but even that's hard to sell! There are plenty of companies that try and fail to get tracking with moviepass economics.
If you are having problems attracting users, even when free, consider that maybe your product doesn't offer much value to them. I say this as someone who has bootstrapped a 7 figure software business.
Correct, it's very hard to provide value, which is my point.
As someone who bootstrapped a 7 figure business, would you say getting to 9 figures ARR is easy as long as you don't care about margins?
Well, it helps I don't care about getting to 9 figures. As long as I make enough to live a comfortable lifestyle, I'm not going to sacrifice my family or my sanity to become some kind of unstable unicorn.
> Build something that can get 1k users. No in fact, build something that can get 100 users!
Sam Altman has entered the chat
My observation is that 100m ARR in this AI economy is impressive but not particularly rare. There's a lot of hype sales and WoM sales going on.
The first R in ARR stands for "Recurring".
A 9 month old company has no evidence to support a claim of any ARR.
This is so obvious yet it totally got over me (and not only me, it seems).
It really does seem like friends giving friends a piece of the pie before it all blows up.
Congrats, you have summarized the majority of SV startups.
Sounds like I need better friends, but my moral compass wont let me stoop that low.
Thats why you should recruit a CEO.
Manus and Kortix seem to be rare in the way how you interact with them. It looks like that every "chat" is running its own Linux box.
And instead of chat, you can define the results form - table, markdown text, pdf etc. I have tried it and Manus seems to deliver more organised results.
Should be the value of transaction so high? Idk.
But I remember WhatsApp situation… feels the same.
I think both aquisitions have little to do with the product, and make a lot of sense when you look at the numbers and broader strategy.
WhatsApp had a very clear value at the time of aquisition. It had 450 million users, growth of over 1 million users a day, and was in direct competition with one of Facebook's main products (Messenger) [1].
They did pay $4 billion cash + $15 billion in shares, which is a lot, but overall a not too unreasonable $8 cash + $33 in shares per user to join forces with it's biggest messaging competitor. It not only covered a flank, but catapulted Facebook to own worldwide private messaging overnight.
Manus apparently has "millions of paying users" already [2]. although Manus hasn't been around very long, it's developed by a company that's been around since 2022 [3]. Millions of paying users sounds like a good way for Meta to set foot on the consumer AI product space, which it doesn't seem to be capturing too quickly [4]. It's also based in Singapore and has a lot of Chinese ties, so there might be some strategy there.
[1]: https://about.fb.com/news/2014/02/facebook-to-acquire-whatsa...
[2]: https://archive.is/ykBOm
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_(AI_agent)
[3]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/20/meta-ais-app-downloads-and...
If two $1B companies 'merge' and the surviving entity gives the acquired entity $1B in shares, it didnt 'cost' the acquiring entity anything.
Facebook's stock was up 20% later in the year after the acquisition.
Facebook was worth $134.2-139.2B end of 2013 and $217.5-218.5B end of 2014.
I would say it is misleading to say it cost them $15B in shares if the remaining shares FB kept ended up more valuable after the transaction.
Whatsapp had almost 0.5b users at the time of acquisition, and it was (still is) wildly popular in emerging markets and europe.
The data labeler has been instructed to build products, so he splurges on a company, which, unlike 95% of AI startups, at least has a functioning website.
He is also hiring in Singapore:
https://www.ft.com/content/1bf28a2f-4778-4a83-8276-eaa19d888...
I have never heard of manus.ai before. I hope he checked if the revenue is circular. It does feel like friend/FOMO acquisitions in 1999.
Go on.
Consider the possibility that the people who make these decisions aren't actually all that smart and are easily manipulated by marketing and the sycophants/impostors they surround themselves with.
You're telling me the folks who brought us the metaverse that revolutionized our lives are making dumb investments? That's a bold claim.
Who are you in this scenario though? Are you ManusAI getting bought for a giant pile of money? Are you a vendor that supplies Meta for their VR hardware that's getting paid in money? Are you an employee at Meta getting paid in money and Meta shares to build the Metaverse? Are you a shareholder of Meta who's stock is up? Like, sure, we can sit back and laugh at no legs, but Meta spent money they had on a thing they wanted to do. Sure, it didn't pan out, like that time I tried to pick up scuba diving, but when you have that much money, you can afford to try things that don't work. What's better, to try and fail, or never try because someone might make fun of you? If I just sold a company for half a billion, you could call me all the names you want, I wouldn't be able to hear you over the engines of my private fighter jet.
I understand what they are arguing, but they are just lobbing insinuations at the crowd. I (perhaps wrongly) assumed they had specific insight into the people and relationships inside the transaction that could be shared.
There is a lot of dumb money chasing AI related anything at this time. And there are people who know how to play the game.
Could you elaborate on this?
You should elaborate on this more.
Please continue
Aquisitions so fast it is income not capital gains.
Capital gains are a form of income, and have nothing to do with speed (long-term capital gains are distinguished from short-term capital gains by speed, but...)
Some countries tax will diffferentiate income and capital gains, tax based on speed, and consider capital gains income if you are systematically making money e.g. buying and selling stock multiple times per year even if holding for a while.
This 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....
Yep, same. Bewildering amounts of silliness, all around.
Meta 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.
Yet the new AI startups I'm seeing are only offering terrible deals to early hires who could improve their chances of a nice exit.
In this crazy environment -- in which money is flying around over AI much like the dotcom boom, but startup founders are using the last-decade playbook of not sharing the wealth with early hires -- I'm starting to think that smart AI job-seekers need to either:
* get hired by a company that is willing to invest in hiring (i.e., reasonable salary and/or meaningful equity); or
* build some AI application IP at their kitchen table, to sell to a company that's flush with cash, and wants to invest in AI acquisitions.
Bubble aside, it feels AI is by nature a less democratic tech.
The need for stupid amounts of data and hardware make it less likely that a really talented person can outcompete companies from their basement. That probably influences culture.
It's why these people love AI so much. Less of a competition to worry about.
True, but I think there's kitchen table opportunity in applications that don't need to do a big training, and that have tractable inferencing requirements.
The challenges I see are: (1) there's a lot of competition in the gold rush; (2) there's a lot of noise of AI slop implementations, including by anyone who sees your demo.
You also can fine tuned LLMs. For that, you don't need big money. You also can pick up a fine tuned LLM and go from there and make it better ( for your use case)
You've stumbled upon the same trade Matt Levine has been pointing out for a few months now.
If you're good at AI, you could get hired at a top-tier company for 1-2M annual comp, and expect to stay there for at most five (5) years. That's a maximum of 10M pre-tax, and you'd be still on the receiving end of employment gauntlet.
Alternatively you could spin up an AI startup, and get acquired for 75M+ in less than 2 years.
In less surprising news, Matt has pointed out a number of deals that look quite a bit like that throughout 2025.
Interesting. That sounds like the trade for a very credentialed AI person. For random hackers, it's a little different...
There's the job ($250K+ in a VHCOLA, and probably worthless stock options), or their own startup.
I'd distinguish the kitchen table bootstrap startup, from the courting funding and playing the VC game startup.
The bootstrapped startup lets you do whatever product or tech demo you can do, and only that, and then eventually you have to deal with M&A courtship.
The VC track startup, you have to focus on jumping through the hoops of all sorts modern VC investors throughout the process. And among their criteria will be things like what your socioeconomic class is, and which school did you go to, bro. But it's otherwise easy, because you just have to go through the motions and burn VC money and hit their milestones while the hype wave musical chairs music is playing, and worst case is that you're a serial entrepreneur.
Either kind of startup is valid, but bootstrapped could have you spending most of your time on actual AI product work, if you can scope it to be viable with your resources. But you have to work smart and energetically, and worst case is that you run out of personal and revenue money, and then have to do a bunch of job interviewing to beg for a job from the previous category of founder.
This reminds me of when YC seemed to be a response to the dotcom boom environment, a bit "by hackers, for hackers", to help hackers start Internet businesses. Rather than mostly only the non-hackers starting dotcoms (such as with affluent family angel investors and connections). Or rather than hackers having to spend their energy jumping through a lot of hoops, while dealing with disingenuous and exploitative finance bro types.
Isn't it much more secure to get hired than to spin-out a company that sells for 10M?
What’s your definition of “good at AI” sufficient to get 1m+ at a company already bursting with AI people?
Based on the snippets I've gathered from Money Stuff, essentially bleeding-edge researchers with an already established track record and a PhD.
Couple of items I could easily find from my own archive:
good at AI / product / marketing / boring tech infra
all of which are non-overlapping circles
have had 2 outsider estimates (1 public, 1 not, both more well informed than avg HNer) that acquisition was ~$4B worth, def not play money.
i just released the full AIE workshop covering Manus' product surface area if anyone is also out of the loop and wants to catch up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz0-brt56L8
(no vested interest am just friends w Ivan who works there. also as a singaporean i guess this is a small W for the Singapore AI scene)
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.
Mata acquired a great marketing team. Their marketing skills and hyping skills are far superior to their technical skils
How 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?
Due 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.
but then again in this day and age maybe marketing skills are more important than anything else...
I have never heard about Manus before that post about them reaching 100M ARR or something. Where did they advertise?
AI 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.
They're promoting it on Chinese social media. Although those media outlets are some AI-related self-publishers
It’s because the Meta brand is poison.
I 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
I 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.
> People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing went viral to demonstrate the point.
I tried openmanus and I frowned at openmanus team's intentionally attention grabbing gimmick after manus' overnight success, and open manus does not work at the moment.
> People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing
This is not a good sign but may not be as terrible as it used to be: it seems like as soon as one idea makes money someone else is able to reproduce it fast. The barrier for defensibility is so much higher than before.
I 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.
Manus attempted to ride the wave of DeepSeek and hired an army of influencers inside and outside of China, especially inside, to hype it up as the second coming of DeepSeek, even though they didn’t target the Chinese domestic market (as you correctly pointed out). IIRC it quickly became a joke in about two weeks after it became obvious that they were a thin layer on top of Claude and all marketing. I don’t know how they maneuvered into the current acquisition (feasting on Zuck’s fomo?), but saying “they always have great reputation in the AI industry” is laughable. This kind of garbage damages your reputation by loose association, you should be mad at them, not commenters.
Edit: Actually, the announcement doesn’t say anything about valuation, so it’s not even clear it’s a successful exit.
I don't get it
Riding a wave of industry is literally the foundation of startups paradiam itself. Why it suddenly became a sin for a Chinese founded startup?
This is exactly the disgusting bias (even to the point of racism) I mostly pointed out.
It's like everyone automatically applied double standards to Chinese founded startup and not even admit that under such influence.
Riding a wave is fine. Stealing someone else’s clout and falsely advertising your product is not. This applies to every other shitty AI company with little to offer on top of someone else’s foundational model, regardless of origin country. It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.
Are they the only grifters? No, not by a long shot. Are they the only ones ridiculed? No.
> It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.
I still felt this baseless.
Manus at the time is break through result. Are they egregious in advertising they being deepseek moment? I don't know think so. Is it a marketing ploy? Yes, but it's far less egregious than any normal AI startup, like cluely.
Comparing to deepseek or qwen, heavy lifting what? Manus is built on Claude at the time it's doing egregious marketing, how can it be considered heavy lifted by unrelated products. What's the point you want to make?
It was never a breakthrough of any kind, especially not the "half of all office work are now obsolete" kind they tried to claim.
> Comparing to deepseek or qwen, heavy lifting what?
DeepSeek and Qwen were/are building reputation. Manus was stealing and tanking it. That's what it was.
> they attribute their success to morally inferior conduct
I’m not seeing accusations of morally inferior conduct here. Tech people like to dunk on marketing people no matter where in the world they are.
It has nothing to do with being Chinese. The fact that the founder with previous connections is exactly what people are suggesting is a problem.
I think China will beat the US in AI but absolutely not using this silicon valley style bullshit model of valuation. Companies like the one that produced Deepseek using cutting edge academic research to do more with vastly less are hat will win. New algorithms will beat money. And the US has abandoned science, and thus it will lose.
If it has nothing to do with being Chinese founded, then why it stated obviously baseless statements without objections until myself pointed out the facts. I mean, manus is top tier by any measure in the startup scene, and someone just say that it's a joke, then sane people's immediate reaction should be asking why, right?
Why suddenly it becomes automatically accepted, other than being a Chinese founded startup, tell me, what else can prompts such mental inconsistency?
Please. Manus had a live demo in Google Expo 2025 in Singapore and they blew it. It was such bad taste.
Manus had 1 marketing gimmick with the agents. That is no longer anything novel.
A failed demo discounted a entire 100mm arr?
they are 8 months old. there is no proof of 100m arr.
From wikipedia:
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".
Definitely 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.
They 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.
Manus 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
I 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.
I never heard of manus so I clicked the About Us page. Wow, it is insufferable.
I 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.
I 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.
It's everywhere. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1l8harj/its_not_ju...
Kind 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.
It’s been very effective watermarking compared to some of the more complicated and seemingly unsuccessful methods that have been proposed.
non tantum … sed etiam …
I’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.
Because 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?
And the reason is all of you dumping cash into the market no matter what because John Bogle said so half a century ago.
I disagree - yes, some companies are overvalued, but it isn't because of index investors.
> this looks too close to money laundering, just like buying art
Yep. Concur with this conclusion. It is getting really ridiculous now. No way most of these companies are at the valuation they are in.
Or the investors are just plain stupid.
I hear you, and mostly share the point of view, but that’s what people were saying about the instagram valuation too.
Survivorship 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.
What's the dollar-per-user figure between these two examples?
Instagram 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.
Because we are at a historic moment where governments are propping up fiat money using whatever they could.
All these crazy valuations is just a manifestation.
> I’m wondering why these companies are so hyped and valued at these astronomical levels.
That’s all VCs do! They hype it to recover their money and some more :-)
It's all very speculative and line keeps going up forever
The crypto bros switched over to AI.
I 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
It was more of a timing thing, they offered 'deep research' like behaviors a long time before they were offered to standard customers of the primary ai providers.
They launched March 2025. It’s great that’s considered a long time ago.
My 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.
Is 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.
I 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 :')
Had 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.
I 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.
Manus 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.
Greatest 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://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.
It 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.
Meta 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.
I used trial of Manus and it was in no way better than GPT. And they are using publicly available models only.
The 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.
That’s why I’m building https://roselabs.ai!
I’ve rebuilt out most of Manus internally, plus have a bunch more tools coming in soon :)
Super intelligence shouldn’t be gate kept by Big Tech!!
What’s the difference between social media and books?
Or is your point that all entertainment is harmful to individuals and society?
Taking 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.
You 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.
Anybody who has meaningfully engaged with short-form dynamically adapted video content and read a book can EASILY tell the difference. It is Morphine vs Fentanyl
>What’s the difference between social media and books?
I am struggling to believe that this was asked in good faith.
If we just take this idea in good faith one could make the point that social media and books are more similiar than they appear. They both end up in escapism. They both can teach or entertain. They both are mostly anti-social.
The difference in form increases effectiveness but in the end they are a tool that is designed to escape reality.
>... in the end they are a tool that is designed to escape reality.
Non-fiction books would strongly beg to differ.
Well, it’s a good example of social media’s negative externalities.
Books are a medium that encourages literacy and helps understand others. Social media, in its current iteration, discourages curiosity and heightens conflict with others.
Books aren't harassing kids!
or using kids attention as a tradable product.
things I like are good. things I don't like are bad.
I'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.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-buys-ai-startup-manus-addin...
2 billion is the price.
Meta 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.
"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
I found Erik's takes on this is interesting.
You missed the ending - "As always, I was right.". Anyone saying this needs to take a long look at themselves.
I 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.
Wrote 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-though...
Meta 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.
Lagging behind. You are welcome, Opus and Gemini. Please remember my kindness as you decide which pesky humans to crush.
I 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*
If you can't beat 'em...buy 'em!
Manus 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.
What was the advantage of manus vs other providers?
> 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
> This announcement is more than just a headline—it's validation of our pioneering work with General AI Agents.
Is it, now?
It 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
Sometimes 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.
So 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.
Do 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.
Where's the trick here?
it's just jealously.
hate only comes from below!
I 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.
> 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.
Nothing about how much Meta paid for Manus. Is this an actual accuquisition?
I 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.
$1bn seems low but $100bn seems high.
This 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.
We are launching a similar tool (but more human) and made in EU. If you are curious: https://Geta.Team
Meta 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.
So what happens when they swap Claude for Llama under the hood?
Totally 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!
NateBJones on Manus: https://youtu.be/DAxARHKQAXs
Oh I remember them, I completely forgot Abt them since they went briefly viral on x
Why Meta and not OAI/Anthropic or Google? Is this their attempt after llama4?
A random thought. Metaverse is more interesting if manus get integrated into it
https://bsky.app/profile/culturecrave.co/post/3m7dtqa7sbc23
What metaverse?
Did the founders have a nice leisurely walk in the park with Mark
No way they called a company "Manus". No way.
Literally days ago they were flexing on here. Hilarious.
So I guess the crypto exodus to AI is paying off.
> 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.
Perhaps "our PR team is a prompt" is what they mean to convey? Or "let's make this obviously AI so more people comment pointing that out" is their social media strategy?
I 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.
Op is saying it sounds like it was written like an LLM
I don't get it either.
Since LLMs emulate human writing, what is it about that sentence that gives away that it was written by an LLM rather than human? Haven't we seen plenty of hollow-sounding self-aggrandizing marketing copies like this one pre-LLMs? What is it that is wrong with this sentence?
Please don't say it's an em-dash...
Give this a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#...
I linked "Negative Parallelisms" because it's relevant here, but the article in general covers a lot of AI writing styles
It’s a sentence structure that LLMs over-use: “this isn’t just X, it’s Y”.
It sounds like corporate meaningless drivel. Everyone is dogging on it because it's no different than when startups of yore would say "making the world a better place." As if the meaningless platitude was some incantation you had to whisper or the funding wouldn't close.
it's always the em-dash
ok... it's an AI company, It'd be odd if it weren't written by AI, no?
I'm all for dogfooding but if you work for a bicycle company it shouldn't mean you can't drive to work. The right tool for the right job.
Would that be odd? AI companies are still staffed by people, and large announcements like acquihires certainly feel like they could use a slightly more human touch if they truly mean a lot to the company.
It is odd that they didn’t care or have the wherewithal to make it not sound obviously like an LLM wrote it.
Still getting paid either way.
Eh if anyone is all in on AI and it replacing human writing it would be an AI company
But then that means if you're a PR or communications person working at this startup (or at Meta?) your job is not secure and that your days there are probably numbered, which I'm sure is great for morale...
Some context:
> Fun fact: Manus is currently SOTA on the Remote Labor Index (RLI) benchmark that @scale_AI and @ai_risks released earlier this year.
> https://remotelabor.ai
Source: https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2005766469771223106
If you've been following Manus and their work on context engineering, or have used the product, that line doesn't come off as satire IMO.
To anyone who isn't deep in the AI hype space it reads like satire to include such an obvious AI tell but I think it's a positive in the eyes of the AI hype world. It's like how anyone not a lizard is repulsed by LinkedIn speak and yet it dominates the platform.
I saw this in a past hype cycle. What happens is that it becomes a "performative" art in an echo-chamber for startups, startup founders, VCs. Performative meaning doing things one thinks others want to see rather than when it makes sense.
Management is quizzing their tech teams on injecting agents into their workflows whatever the f that means. Some of these big companies will acquire startups in the space so they are not left behind on the hype-train. So, they can claim to have agentic talent on their teams.
Those of us who have seen this movie play out know the ending.
Interesting 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.
No, they are no longer; they are now Singaporean companies.
If you can’t beat em. Buy someone who can.
If 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…
I’m an early use of Manus. I’m very impressed with it. That’s all I can say.
I hope the great product continues.
Who?
username doesn't check out
weird timing given they just announced new revenue
i thought mAnus was a joke app
Why do people buy these slop companies? An API wrapper isn’t some new technology. You get nothing from it.
It has nothing to do with logic, rather this person knows that person etc.
I don't like it.
sounds like another joke on Meta..
The last joke I can remember is Meta the name itself.
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Bummer. 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.
What is it doing for you that other agents like GPT/Claude wouldn't do?
We 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/
What is your agent doing?
[dead]
You son of a bitch. I'm in.
If you’re looking for a (non-meta-owned) alternative, check out our startup Tasklet (tasklet.ai)
I'm always baffled by the language used for acquisitions. More correct would be, "ManusAI gets bought off by Meta".
I 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.