Monica, a Chinese startup, released Manus, an AI agent that plans and executes multi-step tasks like browsing, coding, and data analysis. The March 6 launch went viral with people scrambling for invites. It claims top performance on the Gaia benchmark, though questions remain about whether it's genuinely autonomous or repackaged existing tools.
Questions this video answers
March 6, 2025.
From about 999 yuan up to 100,000 yuan (nearly US$14,000).
The Gaia benchmark (Manus reportedly surpasses other systems on all three Gaia difficulty levels).
Monica; founder named Xiaohong.
GE Qao.
Chapters
Foreign. Let's talk about the hottest topic in the AI space right now. A brand new autonomous agent called Manus. If you've been following the hype around AI lately, you might have heard people throwing around terms like GPT moment or Deep Seek moment, Intern that never sleeps, or the Universal Hand. All those catchphrases are pointing to this new product from a Chinese startup called Monica. And believe me, it's been all over social media and tech sites in the past few days. So what exactly is Manus? Well, in short, it's being called the world's first truly general AI agent. There are plenty of AI assistants and chatbots out there. Chatbots that can answer questions, generate text, or even give you code suggestions. But Manus supposedly takes things a step further by actually planning tasks, executing them, and delivering final results. Think of it as an intern who not only brainstorms ideas, but also finishes all the grunt work for you, from writing code to browsing websites and analyzing data. Menace is built by a company called Monica, and their site is Monica im. But the star is this new AI agent, also described as your universal hand. If you've heard the phrase Mens et Manus, from Latin, it means mind and hand, which is basically the motto behind the product. Knowledge shouldn't just be stored in the AI's brain, it should be actively used to get results in the real world. Now, how did it suddenly become so famous? On March 6, 2025, Monica officially launched an early preview for Manus that caused a massive wave of people staying up all night just to snag an invitation code. No joke, some folks even tried reselling codes on various secondhand platforms for anywhere. 999 yuan to a sky high 100,000 yuan. Nearly US$14,000. Most of the codes up for resell were at least several hundred or a few thousand bucks. All because the demand exploded faster than the team expected. The reason for such excitement comes from the advanced capabilities that Manus demonstrates. According to the official site, it's got a multiple agent structure that essentially means different sub agents inside the system handle distinct parts of a task. One agent might do the planning, another might do the actual execution, like writing a Python script or visiting a specific website. And yet another one might verify the accuracy of the result. This multi agent collaboration supposedly mirrors the way a human team works. One person can strategize, another person does the coding and so forth. The synergy of these sub agents is apparently what allows Manus to accomplish super complex tasks. We're talking everything from screening resumes for an open job position, to analyzing real estate listings based on your income and neighborhood preferences, to analyzing stock data from multiple companies, building a dashboard, or summarizing an entire set of financial statements. In one demonstration, a user needed to pick a house in New York with a safe community, a solid school district, and a price range that matched their budget. Manas systematically searched online for safety data, looked up property prices, did budget calculations with Python scripts, and finally presented a polished report complete with a recommended list of properties. That's more than just a cute chatbot answer, it's an entire workflow that ends with a finished product. People have also tested Manus by having it plan a trip to Japan in April, do thorough Tesla stock analyses, create interactive course materials for a middle school teacher who wants to explore, explain momentum theories, and even compile a list of B2B companies from YC's W25 batch. Manus doesn't just spit out bullet points either. It can write code, generate visual dashboards, and lay everything out in a table or Excel Doc if that's what you prefer. Part of what makes this so impressive is how Manus apparently achieved new state of the art performance on something called the Gaia benchmark. Gaia, from what we know, measures how well a general AI assistant can solve real world tasks. According to the team, Mana surpasses other systems like OpenAI's deep research on all three levels of Gaia's difficulty ratings. The specifics of those tests aren't widely detailed, but the hype is real, especially with big claims like we surpass OpenAI's best models at the same level now. Monika is a company founded by Xiaohong, who's a serial entrepreneur and graduated from Huajong University of Science and technology back in 2015. There's also mention of a co founder and chief scientist named GE Qao who did a demonstration video that got hundreds of thousands of views on social platforms within about 20 hours. Another partner, Zhangtao, popped up online saying they've had to limit invites because their servers can't keep up. Interestingly, the company had changes in its shareholder structure in 2024. We even see that at one point, Tencent's venture capital arm invested in them, and so did Zhang Zen Fund in July of 2022. Not a lot of official corporate structure details are out there, but that's standard for many startups trying to scale quickly. There's also chatter about how Manus might become the next deep sea. Some people are comparing that big moment in January to what's happening now with Manus. The Local media and social platforms in China are calling it another Sputnik moment or another GPT moment, referencing how ChatGPT shook up the world. Regardless, you can see it's made enough waves to get coverage from outlets like Global Times, China Daily, Malay Mail, Newsweek, and so on. Everyone is connecting the dots that China has had multiple breakthroughs in AI this year, from large language models to General AI agent One thing that sets Manus apart from typical generative AI is that it's aiming for what we often call artificial general intelligence. It's still obviously not going to pick up your kids from school or do your laundry in the physical world, but in the digital space it can handle multi step processes that you'd usually pass on to an assistant or an intern. We also heard from a few references that at least 21% of enterprises by January 2024 had already adopted AI agents in some capacity. Gartner apparently predicts that number will be above 80% by 2026, which means if Manus does well, it's tapping right into a super hot market. The potential of AI agents to fully automate tasks that like B2B sourcing, analyzing Amazon store data or preparing store sales improvement strategies could be huge for businesses. The official Manus page even shows it can look up local data for a barbecue restaurant in Texas to help them boost sales, or that it can do Kegel competitions by writing code to rank in the top 10%. All these use cases are showcased in the official Use Case gallery. So if you want to try it, how do you get access? Right now it's invitation only, and that's caused this crazy shortage of invites. People are literally flipping them on second hand marketplaces for thousands of dollars. According to the folks behind Manus, they're working on scaling up their servers to allow more open access. They say it'll hopefully be free to use at some point, but no official date is confirmed. Critics are already asking whether Manus is truly autonomous or just combining existing tech in a slick package. Monica's known for creating useful AI based solutions, and especially through their popular browser plugin for ChatGPT, they went from 0 to 10 million users in a flash. So maybe they'll pull off another win here with an AI agent that's actually practical. Regardless of the skepticism, Manus has definitely shaken the AI scene, especially in China. Seeing it unzip files, sift through resumes, run Python scripts and compile real estate data all by itself goes beyond typical chatbot abilities. And then there's its so called autonomous learning where it retains your preferences like TABLE formatted results for future tasks. There's also the question of competition. Giants like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have all teased or introduced agent like systems that can do more than just talk, but we haven't seen many workable agent demos as thorough as Manus. Right now all eyes are on how well Manus scales and whether it really can deliver on this agent of the future promise. Only time will tell if it's another deep seek moment, a fleeting hype train, or the next evolution in AI. Let me know in the comments what you think. Is Manus just a well packaged aggregator of AI tools, or is it truly a game changer pointing us toward a real general AI future? Thanks for tuning in and I'll see you all in the next one. It.
