Manus who “swipes”: Is it really explosive, or is it really marketing?

produced| Sanyan Pro DorAemon

When I woke up, the author was startled, as if the legendary AGI had really arrived.

Here’s the thing. At 6 or 7 in the morning, a large number of self-media outlets suddenly published articles promoting an AI product called Manus:

Different from other AI models, Manus claims to be the world’s first universal Agent, and its strength exceeds OpenAI. Once the product was released, it instantly exploded on the Internet, and various promotional articles emerged one after another, as if AGI had really been realized?

What is Manus?

Combined with the exaggerated publicity of Manus official website and various self-media, this is a universal AI with extremely powerful capabilities. Compared with the currently well-known AI models, at least in terms of publicity, Manus can truly become a personal digital assistant.

In short, when using the traditional AI model, the user raises one request, and the AI completes one; if one request is raised, the AI continues to complete the next one, and so on. Manus does not need to be so cumbersome. After a user makes a request, Manus can automatically search and automatically think about the next step, help users do analysis, and even make detailed tables, PPTs, etc.

For example:

Manus can then conduct a detailed analysis of the data according to user requirements, and then finally provide a report to give reasonable strategies. The entire process is completed by the AI itself.

For example, screening resumes allows Manus to rank dozens of resumes based on candidate information, thereby selecting suitable candidates for a specific position.

During this process, users do not need to manually extract files and upload resumes one by one. Like humans, Manus can unzip files himself, browse each resume page by page, and record important information inside.

Finally, after Manus analysis is completed, it will give suggestions for automatic ranking, and will also classify candidates into different levels based on important dimensions such as work experience.

If a user wants to generate the above information into an Excel table, Manus will present the results in a table format; it is worth noting that Manus will remember the user’s habits. If the user likes to accept the results in a table format, he will give priority to using the table next time he handles a similar task. Presentation.

Manus can also help users screen properties. For example, users who want to buy real estate in New York require Manus to have a safe community environment, low crime rates, high-quality educational resources and not exceed budgets.

Manus will break the task into a list of things to do, search through the Internet, collect information, and finally integrate all the information, combine it with user needs, and provide detailed reports, as if he were a real estate agent.

In addition, Manus can also help users analyze stocks, such as providing the relationship between stock prices of different companies. At this time, Manus is like a stockbroker, able to access relevant websites independently, cross-verify the accuracy of the data, and finally provide Detailed analysis report.

Another self-media demonstration demonstrated using Manus to generate a ten-page PPT introducing Xiaomi SU7.

During the demonstration, the user only prompted the sentence to help me introduce the ten-page PPT of Xiaomi SU7. Then Manus collected information independently and finally generated a ten-page PPT.

This case can also highlight Manus ‘capabilities. The author deliberately tested several large models with the same prompt words, but no PPT file could be directly generated except DeepSeek. He could only give a PPT introduction outline, and the specific content needed to be supplemented by the user himself.

Although DeepSeek does not directly generate PPT, it provides all the content of each page of PPT. All users need to do is typesetting and design.

The product official website shows that Manus achieved SOTA results in the GAIA benchmark test, which significantly exceeded OpenAI, which means that Manus performs well in solving real-world problems.

Really?

If Manus is the prototype of a general Agent, in addition to generating PPT, can other AI applications also implement house search and stock analysis? Can WPS also generate PPT?

Manus is like a fully applicable package.

Manus suddenly exploded this morning, and there are still many doubts.

First, this subversive carnival seems to be limited to the country.

As mentioned above, starting from 6 and 7 o’clock this morning, a large number of self-media articles have been published to promote Manus, but this product has only one video on foreign video platforms, and the number of views is not high, only a few thousand.

Second, this revolutionary product first became popular among self-media rather than technical professionals.

Paradoxically, Manus was first touted by self-media. Products such as AI models often have more judgment among technical professionals.

Moreover, many self-media claimed that they were either friends of Manus’s team or contacted each other through connections.

Some netizens questioned that any concept that is first hyped up by the media is usually hype.

Compared with DeepSeek, DeepSeek did first become popular after various testing experiences by professionals, and then became popular with media publicity.

On March 3, the founder of Manus also visited a well-known AI podcast to warm up the promotion of new products.

Third, the vast majority of cases are provided by officials.

In most of today’s self-media propaganda articles, most of Manus’s reviews are various analyses of official propaganda cases, and only a few media provide unofficial case evaluations.

Although this is due to the fact that Manus currently conducts a few experiences in the form of invitation codes, it is not enough to rely solely on official publicity and needs more evaluation.

Fourth, the promotion is purely domestic, but it seems to be only for overseas countries. Both articles end with a high tone.

In most self-media propaganda articles, Manus was given the emotional value created by a pure China team. For example, dawn breaks in the east and the starry sky tonight belongs to China.

But the strange thing is that Manus’s official website is all in English, and the official promotional videos are all in English with Chinese subtitles. Even the contact information provided on the official website is based on overseas social media such as Platform X.

Moreover, you have to use a foreign login method to register.

A product created purely by a China team is promoted in a purely foreign language, which means that it seems that the target users of this universal Agent are overseas markets, but when it is promoted by the media, it emphasizes being made in China, which feels awkward everywhere.

But no matter what, the overwhelming public opinion campaign has indeed aroused many people’s interest in Manus.

Fifth, who is grabbing the invitation code?

In self-media promotion, Manus’s invitation code is hard to find, but the suspicion here is that without the vigorous promotion of self-media, not many people would know about this, let alone stealing the code; only after publicity will it inspire everyone to explore. Desire, code grabbing occurs.

Moreover, the invitation code model was a social fission marketing technique in the ancient mobile Internet era.

Some netizens posted an article saying that they had communicated with relevant people from Baichuan and mgx on this matter and shared several views:

1. Dismantling manus: The ability is the comprehensive product of compute use + virtual machine + artifacts + a batch of built-in agents.

2. Feasibility: If the agent is not internalized by the model, the agent is a personalized thing. This manus positioning is a bit like bolt.new in the general field (bolt.new is focused on programming tasks). It is obviously completely contradictory and unlikely to be realized.

3. Possibility: The only possibility is to position it as a new entrance and integrate various agent and negotiation use capabilities in the future. This workload is extremely large. I am more optimistic about the integration of protocol models for aggregating mcp, unless we follow this route.

4. Market card slot: It may be a new type of common model exploration like AI search, but it has a higher threshold than AI search and may not be a product that the public can quickly get started.

5. Limitations: People who understand that they are subject to limitations may not be bothered to use them unless there are a few popular scenes that people who don’t understand will not be able to use, but they will become popular in the self-media community.

6. Competitor 1: If it is a universal agent as advertised, then there is a high probability that these universal capabilities will be internalized by the large model in the future.

7. Competitor 2: The main competition among the peers is coze and dify. If this road works, these routes will also be launched in the future.

Some netizens revealed that they had just been invited to attend the Manus internal press conference and were very shocked. This was the first time they received non-consensus verification from another team. The netizen also said that 2025 will be the first year of the outbreak of Agents and is very much looking forward to it.

Some developers pointed out that Manus’s core architecture is highly similar to Anthropic’s ComputerUse, and both rely on a multi-agent virtual machine environment to complete tasks. However, its so-called autonomous planning capabilities are actually based on the call of existing large language models (such as GPT-4) and do not demonstrate breakthroughs in the underlying technology. For example, in the stock analysis case, Manus only obtained data by calling the Yahoo Financial API, and then used Python scripts to generate visual charts. The essence was still a splicing of tool chains.

Based on the current information, Manus has his own advantages, but he is indeed suspected of hype.

The relevant person in charge of the company issued a document in a circle of friends today saying that Manus has never opened any channel for paying for invitation codes; secondly, Manus has never invested any marketing budget; during the internal testing period, priority will be given to ensuring the existing user experience and gradually open invitations in an orderly manner.

That being said, today, a bunch of self-media outlets publish publicity on time and on time in the morning under the banner of friends and connections. Some even awarded Manus Company awards and warmed up on podcasts a few days before the release. Not many people have really experienced the product yet, so there is a big wave of public opinion to boost it. I’m afraid no one will believe it if it’s not marketing.

Whether it is hype or real strength remains to be seen.