China’s Autonomous Agent, Manus, Changes Everything
By Craig S. Smith, Contributor.
Craig S. Smith, Eye on AI host and former NYT writer, covers AI.
Mar 08, 2025, 03:29pm EST
The Second DeepSeek Moment
In late 2023, the release of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI model designed to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4, was described as China’s ‘ Sputnik moment’ for AI. It was the first tangible sign that the country’s researchers were closing the gap in large language model (LLM) capabilities. But Manus represents something entirely different—it is not just another model. It is an agent, an AI system that thinks, plans, and executes tasks independently, capable of navigating the real world as seamlessly as a human intern with an unlimited attention span.
This is what sets Manus apart from its Western counterparts. While ChatGPT-4 and Google’s Gemini rely on human prompts to guide them, Manus doesn’t wait for instructions. Instead, it is designed to initiate tasks on its own, assess new information, and dynamically adjust its approach. It is, in many ways, the first true general AI agent.
For instance, given a zip file of resumes, Manus doesn’t just rank candidates; it reads through each one, extracts relevant skills, cross-references them with job market trends, and presents a fully optimized hiring decision—complete with an Excel sheet it generated on its own. When given a vague command like “find me an apartment in San Francisco,” it goes beyond listing search results—it considers crime statistics, rental trends, even weather patterns, and delivers a shortlist of properties tailored to the user’s unstated preferences.
Forbes
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Another Chinese company rattles Silicon Valley, Manus AI stuns tech world with DeepSeek-level performance in complex task handling; is AGI closer than we think?
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