Manus AI digital assistant from China causes stir

HONG KONG

A new Chinese artificial intelligence agent billed as able to work independently from humans has sent insiders buzzing, some with concern and others with disappointment.

The Butterfly Effect startup has been working quietly for the past year on its AI digital assistant Manus, co-founder Yichao "Peak" Ji said in a launch video posted on YouTube.

"We see it as the next paradigm of human-machine collaboration, and potentially a glimpse into AGI," he said, referencing general artificial intelligence that aims to think the way humans do.

Manus launched in an invitation-only phase last week. Reviews surfacing on social media ranged from sensational to lackluster.

"Manus is the most impressive AI tool I've ever tried," Hugging Face's head of product design Victor Mustar said in a post on X.

Criticism included those saying Manus stumbles on simple tasks such as booking a flight, or that they ran into error messages or endless loops.

And since the AI processing is hosted in the cloud, users worried about the security of their data.

Whether Chinese companies are taking the lead on AI has been a hot topic since China-based DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January.

DeepSeek's model challenges those created by OpenAI, Google, and other U.S. rivals but operates at a fraction of the cost.

The latest artificial intelligence trend has been digital "agents" specialized for specific tasks or fields.

Anthropic and OpenAI have both added such capabilities to their AI platforms since late last year.

Butterfly Effect described Manus as being able to carry out tasks such as buying property in New York or editing a podcast.

But TechCrunch journalist Kyle Wiggers wrote of Manus failing when asked to order him a sandwich or find him a plane ticket to Japan during a tryout.