Butterfly Effect is the latest Chinese AI firm to get global attention, having drummed up interest in Manus, positioned as a “general agent” that can scour online resources to produce reports. Companies like OpenAI and Google are competing in this space, called deep research. Butterfly Effect says Manus has surpassed OpenAI Deep Research on the GAIA benchmark and the world is listening. The Manus Discord server swelled to more than 138,000 members in the past weeks, and “invite codes” to gain access at this “invitation-only” phase are allegedly going for thousands of dollars on Chinese sales app Xianyu.

Typical of most top tier agentic systems, the creators of Manus claim it “can make decisions progressively and complete various tasks independently,” reports SiliconANGLE, using the example of an apartment hunt: “Manus will not just look through various real estate listings, but also research and evaluate multiple factors such as crime rates, weather and commute times to provide more specific recommendations.”

While Manus doesn’t rely on one specific model, but draws from “multiple sub-agents that are specialized in different areas,” that is not a new approach. Nor is its asynchronous ability to run in the background particularly novel.

The Register couches Manus it as “the ‘Future of AI’ and ‘OpenAI Killer’ of the week,” and says comparisons to OpenAI’s Deep Research, “which scours online services to source info that’s compiled into documents” and “tools like Anthropic’s Computer Use API and OpenAI’s Operator Agents, both of which can use a Web browser to perform basic tasks like filling in forms and using e-commerce sites,” are par for the course.

But “Manus looks like it does all that and more — maybe faster too according to its own benchmarks,” The Register adds, citing a launch video that “depicts it doing three chores at super-speed.” Thes are: research-based recommendations, report preparation and correlation analysis.

“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,” writes Forbes, calling it “in many ways, the first true general AI agent.”

Forbes cites the example of sifting through job candidates: “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”

A demo is available at Manus.im.