Manus AI - The Calm Before the Hypestorm … (vs Deep Research + Grok 3)

By my count, There were around 12 underrated developments in AI over the last few days. But they may have to stay underrated for just a moment longer because the 13th Manus AI has millions of people on its wait list and maybe 100 million people talking about it. So for just a few hours, Gemini's new image editing feature, the rise in reward hacking, OpenAI's secret creative writing model, and just about everything else will have to wait. To be honest, MANA saves a lot about the AI landscape for both good and ill. So let's get started. Before I show you my tests and comparisons to Deep Research, Grok3 Deep Search, and Gemini's Deep Research, I want you to think to yourself about what the perfect hype campaign would be for me. It would start like this. Call your product a glimpse into potential AGI. While other AI stops at generating ideas, Manus delivers results. We see it as the next paradigm of human machine collaboration and potentially equally glimpse into AGI. Then put your product behind a wait list, but give early access, prioritizing those who you think might hype your product. A perfect outcome would be comments like this one that China reached AGI with Manus before we saw GPT5. Next create enough scarcity that invite codes are being offered as competition prizes on Twitter, and even better if you can create stories that they are being resold for thousands of dollars online. If that was true, I could very quickly mint it because I was given multiple invite cod. Of course, it's also definitely wise to delay mentioning that your model is based on Claude because that would slightly dampen down hype and also explains why your website is blocked in China. Because that model is blocked in China. Oh, and as a cherry on top, mention that you have benchmarks, plural, but then only provide a single benchmark. And of course, while you're at it, make bloody sure that that is a benchmark that you outperform your rivals on. Now, of course, with that long rant, I am being awfully cheeky because Manus actually fairly cool. The team behind Manus have been kind to me, so it's almost a little bit rude for me to do that rant, but I just couldn't resist giving you a quick insight into how the hype machine works. I'm sure that every single industry has its own hype merchants. It's just that in a field as important to the future as AI, I don't want you guys or anyone to fall into the extremes. The extremes being that every new development is just one click away from automating everyone's job, and the other extreme being that AI is just all hype and there's just literally really no substance there at all. Just quickly though, while we're on this particular Gaia benchmark, which was written in part by Yann Lecun, famously a skeptic of LLMs I and perhaps you are quite impressed by these scores compared to OpenAI deep research. The problem is it is a public benchmark, so we are slightly reliant on trust that they didn't over optimize to game essentially the benchmark, for example, because the answers are public, you could keep training your model and optimizing it until it reached a certain bar on this particular benchmark. For the few of you who haven't actually heard of Manus AI, what is it and what does it do? Well, it's a bit like a combination of OpenAI's operator and deep Research systems. Think of Operator as an agent that can take actions on your computer. It can click things and indeed book restaurants, do that kind of thing. Operator can be fairly cumbersome though, and require a lot of babysitting, where it'll do one thing at a time and then ask you another question. In contrast, Deep Research, after clarifying your query, will go off and search in this case the 37 sources in 14 minutes and produce a comprehensive output. The research in particular, I think is great. But the reason that Operator and Deep Research aren't particularly popular or terribly widespread is that until very recently they were limited to the $200 tier called the Pro tier from OpenAI. The final bit of context comes from CLAUDE projects, which you may or may not be familiar with, which you can think of as interactive previews of the work you've done with claude. Put all of that together and ignore every single bug and you have Manus AI, I asked, for example, create a simple website densely packed with text about what happened with LLMs in March 2025, lit up only by the cursor, which is acting as a flaming torch. Notice the model would have to do a fairly comprehensive web search a la Deep Research, to find out everything that happened with LLMs in March 2025, but then also do a CLAUDE project to make an interactive website, and then it would have to come up with this little window. So like OpenAI's operator, you could see it taking actions in real time. In fact, you can stop it and guide it, and when it all works, it's pretty impressive. Here is that website, and I had to do pretty much nothing to get it working like this and that is where Manus is great tying together all of these disparate capabilities, albeit not being incredible at each of them, but tying them together into this one agent. But let's get a few things out of the way to dispel some false notions. Manus uses dozens of tools and several models, but the key model behind it as of today, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, according to the information, is Claude 3.7 Sonnet. And that model is fairly expensive and incredibly rate limited, which has led to one estimate reported in the MIT Technology Review of a per task cost of about $2 for Manus AI. Before we rush then and call this China's second deep seat moment, we've got to realize a couple of crucial disanalogies with deepseek. Deepseek made their own model. Manus AI is a compilation of other people's models. And second, for me, what made the Deep SEQ moment was how cheap it was and how widespread the availability was. Hence it rocketing up the app charts at $2 per task. If you just did, say five tasks per day, you can just calculate what the cost would be over a month. And yes, this is probably why even youtubers like me who got early access hit maximum daily usage limits pretty quickly. Tell me what you think. But no, I don't see Malice AI as the second deep seek moment. What about quality though? Well, in my opinion it does everything really quite well, but nothing at state of the art level. Let me give you a few examples and try to bring in comparisons with deep research from OpenAI, Grok3 deep search, and even Gemini's deep research. Yes, the names are confusing, but Manus AI is multimodal in the sense you can upload an image and get it to perform a task based on that image. For example, I said list the founders of each company featured in this image so it would have to recognize the names of the companies and then of course perform a kind of deep research. I tried this with all four of the tools I just mentioned and I'm going to give you the results in order of speed. Fastest was deep research from Gemini Advanced, which told me that adding files is not available yet. That was done in less than one second, which is quite impressive. Next was Grok3 deep search, which took only two and a half minutes and analyzed 344 sources. It was fast, but skipped plenty of the companies. The results were generally accurate, but as you can see here it said unknown founders for a bunch of these, whereas I found it relatively easy to find the founders for quite a few of these companies, Manus AI and OpenAI's deep research took roughly around the same amount of time, about 15 minutes, but the performance of Manus AI was noticeably worse. What I mean by that is if you scroll down, there were two companies where it gave up trying to find the founder that's Curated AI and Sezeon. Deep Research finds the founders of those companies and I double checked and they seem to be fairly reliable to me. For Sezeon, they're reported on the website given as well as Crunchbase, and for Curated AI in a fairly popular magazine. I'm not the only one, of course, to report accuracy issues. There are plenty of reports online like this one where Manus AI was asked about the gaming console market and ignored Nintendo Switch. It would be far easier for me to just hyperventilate about all the things it can create and the research it can do if I don't check the accuracy. Let me try to give you another example and trust me, I want to be as fair as possible to Manus. This time I gave all four of those agent tools that I mentioned a kind of meta task to research about each other. Create a table comparing comparing deep research from OpenAI, Manus AI, deep research from Google, deep search from Grok3 with rows for at least 10 features, price, speed and 20 clickable sources. On this one, Arguably Manus did as well as Deep Research. It took far, far longer, around 20 minutes. But I don't know if that's because of the rate limits that are going on at the moment because so many people are using it, or if that's just an inbuilt limitation. This is what Manus came up with. And if you can't see Grok 3, that's because the UI of Manus is a lot more jank compared to the others. The output is solid, if not entirely reliable. Let me give you two examples. First, on the cost per query, it said it cannot be calculated for itself Manus AI. Now, while it's true that pricing is not public, as I showed you earlier in this video, there are some public estimates about the price. $2 per query. Okay, you might say that one's debatable, but how about this one? Towards the end it said what about performance metrics for Manus? No published benchmark results. Its own website gives the Gaia benchmark on the column right next to it. It quotes the GAIA benchmark for OpenAI's research. So if it can't be fully relied upon to quote its own benchmark results, then it does make you wonder, did it fully deserve the absolute cacophony of hype that it got in recent days? Let's be fair though, it did give me 20 clickable sources for me to conduct further investigation, which is what I asked for. The research from OpenAI only gave me 15 sources, and worse than that, it didn't give me a table, it gave me bullet points, and that was pretty disappointing. It too didn't cite Gaia, although it did link to an article which mentioned Gaia. So that's kind of slightly better for deep research. Grok3 did a commendable job, but you could tell it was drawing on less compute because the table at the end felt a bit rushed. Its own research had confirmed that Deep Research was available for 10 queries per month to the plus tier, but this wasn't covered in the table. Again, its research had highlighted certain benchmark scores, but these weren't mentioned in the table. Gemini's Deep Research did a decent job. It was very quick, but the table was fairly scant on detail. This is definitely not to say that Google DeepMind aren't cooking though, and there are plenty of developments from that company that I want to cover very soon on the channel now like Operator Manus can do things like actually book things for you, but according to all reports and my own experience, I would really caution against necessarily trusting it that much to do so Manus AI for me is very much then fitting into the pattern that I've seen for four trends that have emerged in 2025. I did a video on this five days ago for my Patreon and the trends are that models are getting pricier, they are very patchy in performance, they have epic moments, but can be internally deceptive. I will have much more to say about reward hacking on this channel very soon. Here then for me is the lesson of this video, which is this kind of marketing actually works. Two million people have signed up to the waitlist and there is something there, right? As you've seen in this video, Manus AI is a great compilation of different tools and models and often gets the job done. But because this quote sophisticated press push, end quote reported in an interview with Xiao Hong, the founder of Manus AI was so successful. Expect more of it. Expect an endless list of new companies pushing these YouTube campaigns and tweet storms. Hype works. There's just no other way around it. But if Manus AI comes out at being say $200 a month, I personally would give it a miss. Thank you so much for watching. But if you have any interest in jailbreaking, what I wouldn't give a miss is the Grey Swan Challenges recently announced on their website. The links will be in the description and they are sponsoring this video. And in particular, look at this competition start started just five days ago. You can see the leaderboard here. And no, you don't have to be a professional hacker to get involved. The prize pool is over $130,000. From my perspective, you're helping the models become more reliable by red teaming them in public. So it's kind of like a public service. You know what? I'm kind of almost tempted myself. So it's probably time to draw this video to an end. Thank you so much for watching to the end and have a wonderful day.