Is it, now?
Anyone else thought this was satire when they read that as the second line in the announcement?
I literally laughed, then clicked the top left logo, to check out the homepage and see if this `ManuAI` was a real website.
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You would think that they would know better to at least edit that out.
It's not just ironic -- it's cosmically poetic.
They are saying the announcement means more to them than just a headline that most will scroll past. Maybe you are seeing something I'm not.
But then that means if you're a PR or communications person working at this startup (or at Meta?) your job is not secure and that your days there are probably numbered, which I'm sure is great for morale...
Since LLMs emulate human writing, what is it about that sentence that gives away that it was written by an LLM rather than human? Haven't we seen plenty of hollow-sounding self-aggrandizing marketing copies like this one pre-LLMs? What is it that is wrong with this sentence?
Please don't say it's an em-dash...
I linked "Negative Parallelisms" because it's relevant here, but the article in general covers a lot of AI writing styles
Management is quizzing their tech teams on injecting agents into their workflows whatever the f that means. Some of these big companies will acquire startups in the space so they are not left behind on the hype-train. So, they can claim to have agentic talent on their teams.
Those of us who have seen this movie play out know the ending.
> Fun fact: Manus is currently SOTA on the Remote Labor Index (RLI) benchmark that @scale_AI and @ai_risks released earlier this year.
Source: https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2005766469771223106
If you've been following Manus and their work on context engineering, or have used the product, that line doesn't come off as satire IMO.
Meta did more than just take part in this system. It perfected it, scaled it worldwide, and resisted meaningful change until public pressure or regulation forced its hand.
That is why it is worrying to see Meta present itself as a trusted builder of the next major technology wave. When a company repeatedly puts growth ahead of social harm, skepticism is not bias. It is common sense. Giving that company even more powerful and less transparent tools should cause us alarm.
Or is your point that all entertainment is harmful to individuals and society?
Books are static. They do not watch you, adapt to you in real time, or optimize themselves to keep you reading at any cost. Social media does. It measures behavior, runs constant experiments, and tunes feeds to maximize engagement, often by amplifying outrage, fear, or tribalism.
In books it’s exactly the same thing: do not believe for one second that the publishing industry does not watch engagement metrics (aka: sales) and does not adapt to the taste of the market. It’s also tuned to maximize outrage; see how popular unauthorized biographies of polarizing figures have become - who is next on Walter Isaacson list ? I am betting Trump must be somewhere there and it’s gonna be a banger.
I am struggling to believe that this was asked in good faith.
The difference in form increases effectiveness but in the end they are a tool that is designed to escape reality.
Non-fiction books would strongly beg to differ.
I’ve rebuilt out most of Manus internally, plus have a bunch more tools coming in soon :)
Super intelligence shouldn’t be gate kept by Big Tech!!
"Following Manus's launch in March 2025, Butterfly Effect raised $75 million in a funding round led by Benchmark at a valuation of approximately $500 million in April 2025."
Half a billion a month after launch and acquisition before the end of the same year. Wild times.
Perhaps just seeing what advanced LLM users are up to is worth the cost. They get a direct peek with this acquisition.
And instead of chat, you can define the results form - table, markdown text, pdf etc. I have tried it and Manus seems to deliver more organised results.
Should be the value of transaction so high? Idk.
But I remember WhatsApp situation… feels the same.
WhatsApp had a very clear value at the time of aquisition. It had 450 million users, growth of over 1 million users a day, and was in direct competition with one of Facebook's main products (Messenger) [1].
They did pay $4 billion cash + $15 billion in shares, which is a lot, but overall a not too unreasonable $8 cash + $33 in shares per user to join forces with it's biggest messaging competitor. It not only covered a flank, but catapulted Facebook to own worldwide private messaging overnight.
Manus apparently has "millions of paying users" already [2]. although Manus hasn't been around very long, it's developed by a company that's been around since 2022 [3]. Millions of paying users sounds like a good way for Meta to set foot on the consumer AI product space, which it doesn't seem to be capturing too quickly [4]. It's also based in Singapore and has a lot of Chinese ties, so there might be some strategy there.
[1]: https://about.fb.com/news/2014/02/facebook-to-acquire-whatsa...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_(AI_agent)
[3]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/20/meta-ais-app-downloads-and...
Facebook's stock was up 20% later in the year after the acquisition.
Facebook was worth $134.2-139.2B end of 2013 and $217.5-218.5B end of 2014.
I would say it is misleading to say it cost them $15B in shares if the remaining shares FB kept ended up more valuable after the transaction.
Build something that can get 1k users. No in fact, build something that can get 100 users!
No offense, but you sounds like someone who has never actually had to build a business or product. It's hard to build something people use, even if its free. This isn't moviepass concept where they're literally selling $10 for $5, but even that's hard to sell! There are plenty of companies that try and fail to get tracking with moviepass economics.
As someone who bootstrapped a 7 figure business, would you say getting to 9 figures ARR is easy as long as you don't care about margins?
Sam Altman has entered the chat
A 9 month old company has no evidence to support a claim of any ARR.
He is also hiring in Singapore:
https://www.ft.com/content/1bf28a2f-4778-4a83-8276-eaa19d888...
I have never heard of manus.ai before. I hope he checked if the revenue is circular. It does feel like friend/FOMO acquisitions in 1999.
i just released the full AIE workshop covering Manus' product surface area if anyone is also out of the loop and wants to catch up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz0-brt56L8
(no vested interest am just friends w Ivan who works there. also as a singaporean i guess this is a small W for the Singapore AI scene)
In this crazy environment -- in which money is flying around over AI much like the dotcom boom, but startup founders are using the last-decade playbook of not sharing the wealth with early hires -- I'm starting to think that smart AI job-seekers need to either:
* get hired by a company that is willing to invest in hiring (i.e., reasonable salary and/or meaningful equity); or
* build some AI application IP at their kitchen table, to sell to a company that's flush with cash, and wants to invest in AI acquisitions.
The need for stupid amounts of data and hardware make it less likely that a really talented person can outcompete companies from their basement. That probably influences culture.
The challenges I see are: (1) there's a lot of competition in the gold rush; (2) there's a lot of noise of AI slop implementations, including by anyone who sees your demo.
If you're good at AI, you could get hired at a top-tier company for 1-2M annual comp, and expect to stay there for at most five (5) years. That's a maximum of 10M pre-tax, and you'd be still on the receiving end of employment gauntlet.
Alternatively you could spin up an AI startup, and get acquired for 75M+ in less than 2 years.
In less surprising news, Matt has pointed out a number of deals that look quite a bit like that throughout 2025.
Couple of items I could easily find from my own archive:
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-09-29/the-perfect-ai-startup
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-06-26/anyone-can-sell-you-spacex-stock
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-09-15/elon-musk-bought-some-stockall of which are non-overlapping circles
There's the job ($250K+ in a VHCOLA, and probably worthless stock options), or their own startup.
I'd distinguish the kitchen table bootstrap startup, from the courting funding and playing the VC game startup.
The bootstrapped startup lets you do whatever product or tech demo you can do, and only that, and then eventually you have to deal with M&A courtship.
The VC track startup, you have to focus on jumping through the hoops of all sorts modern VC investors throughout the process. And among their criteria will be things like what your socioeconomic class is, and which school did you go to, bro. But it's otherwise easy, because you just have to go through the motions and burn VC money and hit their milestones while the hype wave musical chairs music is playing, and worst case is that you're a serial entrepreneur.
Either kind of startup is valid, but bootstrapped could have you spending most of your time on actual AI product work, if you can scope it to be viable with your resources. But you have to work smart and energetically, and worst case is that you run out of personal and revenue money, and then have to do a bunch of job interviewing to beg for a job from the previous category of founder.
This reminds me of when YC seemed to be a response to the dotcom boom environment, a bit "by hackers, for hackers", to help hackers start Internet businesses. Rather than mostly only the non-hackers starting dotcoms (such as with affluent family angel investors and connections). Or rather than hackers having to spend their energy jumping through a lot of hoops, while dealing with disingenuous and exploitative finance bro types.
I have many questions:
- Will Meta fuck this up as they seem (in my opinion) to do with most of the acquisitions? Oculus? Drop.io?
- Did they grossly overpay?
- Will innovation slow to a crawl (eg. Instagram, Whatsapp)?
- Will Manus' top talent bail?
- How is it conceivable Meta couldn't build this themselves. It can't possibly have been Manus' user base they were after, can it?
- How much trouble am I in for telling my wife to sell her Meta stock two weeks ago?
The acquisition is confusing to me.
Do you even have to ask?
Yes
Anthropic and Bun shared a major investor. Looking at this it's not clear of Meta actually invested in Manus. But they clearly aren't showing much signs of turning into a unicorn meaning that its investors would have been looking for some kind of exit. An acquisition by Meta counts as a win. Meta has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies in terms of investors. Big companies like that helping out friendly investors is quite common. They all need each other in different contexts.
The reason I'm expecting more of this is that investors have been sinking a lot of money into all sorts of AI startups in the past few years. Most of those are most likely not stay independent or get to an IPO. Short of letting them fail, acquisitions with undisclosed amounts are a nice way out for investors and founders to liquidate their investments and save some face in the process.
Meta gets some fresh talent and tech; investors get some return on investment and can claim some kind of exit happened. I doubt a lot of cash changed hands here. Share swaps are a common tool here.
It will be interesting to see what Meta does with Manus. I don't expect they'll do a lot with it. Just speculating but I just don't see a great fit here for Meta. Unless it is to breathe some life into their Llama strategy.
I wonder what Meta their play would actually be though. Do they have any successful GenAI products yet? I don’t use their social media apps so not sure how integrated that is these days.
Edit: commercial products, not Ollama*
It seems M&A door is wide open for 2026.
Guess it's a good follow on to spending billions to try and catch up in LLMs, which will also be commoditized.
1. Insanely overpriced versus over deep research products 2. Deep research has increasingly become a feature in most other products 3. They shot themselves in the foot by sharing very limited usage credits, in the initial wave of DR products pretty much everything was free - ChatGPT, Claude, Pplx, Deepseek. they rolled this back later and added a free credit tier but by then the hype had moved off.
TBF 1. Their post synthesis, formatting abilities were better than others 2. Their initial launch was "hypey" - lots of waitlist based access.
But I had seen somewhere they mention they had hit $100mn in revenue - M&A also signals that DR is increasingly a feature of the labs. And labs missing an assistant will probably buy a well distributed one
These valuations are to the point point that this looks too close to money laundering, just like buying art.
That’s all VCs do! They hype it to recover their money and some more :-)
Yep. Concur with this conclusion. It is getting really ridiculous now. No way most of these companies are at the valuation they are in.
Or the investors are just plain stupid.
All these crazy valuations is just a manifestation.
But I suppose they won't try as hard as before to make the product better. It's such a shame. I've been using it since it launched the video by begging everyone I knew and got an invite code. And I've been on the higher end of subscription ever since.
Curious how much Meta paid them.
Ok, I guess we’re in a bubble.
When it came out is was very good, and had much better results than ChatGPT
The vast majority of whether a deal is good or bad has nothing to do with anything you could be duly diligent about. It has everything do with whether the founders are clever executors to capture market, and the luck of the company in the coming years, the latter you cannot predict.
This statement is completely baseless
1. Manus was never targeting Chinese domestic market, for obvious reasons
2. Manus was founded by successful founder with exit, backed toptier investors in China, they always have great reputation in the AI industry
3. Prior to manus' launch, the team developed Monica, as they are the frontier AI chat bot aggregator
I really felt disgusted by stereotyping Chinese startup: they either baselessly downplay the innovation by the team, or they attribute their success to morally inferior conduct, which both are never really different than their western counterparts.
Please stop stereotyping Chinese startup
> they always have great reputation in the AI industry
Highly doubt this.
> the team developed Monica, as they are the frontier AI chat bot aggregator
How is this remotely technically impressive? LLM chat apps have been commoditized for years already.
Even within the Chinese tech/AI community, Manus has often been frowned upon. People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing went viral to demonstrate the point. Most of the positive coverage around Manus came from WeChat PR articles, which I'm sure you know how those Gongzhonghao work.
I agree that the West often stereotypes Chinese startups in unfair ways. But the Manus story is about as stereotypical as it gets.
I tried openmanus and I frowned at openmanus team's intentionally attention grabbing gimmick after manus' overnight success, and open manus does not work at the moment.
This is not a good sign but may not be as terrible as it used to be: it seems like as soon as one idea makes money someone else is able to reproduce it fast. The barrier for defensibility is so much higher than before.
Manus had 1 marketing gimmick with the agents. That is no longer anything novel.
I think China will beat the US in AI but absolutely not using this silicon valley style bullshit model of valuation. Companies like the one that produced Deepseek using cutting edge academic research to do more with vastly less are hat will win. New algorithms will beat money. And the US has abandoned science, and thus it will lose.
Why suddenly it becomes automatically accepted, other than being a Chinese founded startup, tell me, what else can prompts such mental inconsistency?
Edit: Actually, the announcement doesn’t say anything about valuation, so it’s not even clear it’s a successful exit.
Riding a wave of industry is literally the foundation of startups paradiam itself. Why it suddenly became a sin for a Chinese founded startup?
This is exactly the disgusting bias (even to the point of racism) I mostly pointed out.
It's like everyone automatically applied double standards to Chinese founded startup and not even admit that under such influence.
Are they the only grifters? No, not by a long shot. Are they the only ones ridiculed? No.
I still felt this baseless.
Manus at the time is break through result. Are they egregious in advertising they being deepseek moment? I don't know think so. Is it a marketing ploy? Yes, but it's far less egregious than any normal AI startup, like cluely.
Comparing to deepseek or qwen, heavy lifting what? Manus is built on Claude at the time it's doing egregious marketing, how can it be considered heavy lifted by unrelated products. What's the point you want to make?
> Comparing to deepseek or qwen, heavy lifting what?
DeepSeek and Qwen were/are building reputation. Manus was stealing and tanking it. That's what it was.
I’m not seeing accusations of morally inferior conduct here. Tech people like to dunk on marketing people no matter where in the world they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_(AI_agent)
...
Company background
Butterfly Effect Technology was founded by entrepreneur Xiao Hong (Chinese: 肖弘), who previously established Nightingale Technology in 2015.[2] Nightingale developed productivity tools including "Yiban Assistant" (Chinese: 壹伴助手) and "Weiban Assistant" (Chinese: 微伴助手), AI-driven platforms serving over 2 million business users. These products attracted investment from Tencent and ZhenFund.[5]
In 2022, recognizing the potential of large language models, Xiao Hong founded Butterfly Effect and released Monica, an AI assistant browser extension integrating models including ChatGPT and Claude.[5] By 2024, Monica accumulated over 10 million users while maintaining profitability, serving as both a technological foundation and user acquisition platform for Manus.[5]
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Doesn't sound like a "company focused almost entirely on marketing".
I understand there's always some optimism for new tech, but the valuations we're seeing seems absurd to me.
Like, do they expect to see x100 profit for the same vertical? Obviously some new markets have been created, but I don't see them solving any particularly novel business problems.
Hope Meta doesn't hose it.
That's one of the reasons I'm building out in the open:
- https://github.com/codename-co/devs - https://devs.new/
It's not ready for orchestration yet, but most fundamental layers are already working great.
Create your agents using the LLMs of your choosing, directly from your smartphone of you want full privacy, and with no ads, no paywall, no sign up required.
Manus was ahead of its time. But the directions are parting ways.
I was a fan of their initial product but I find it slower than chatpgpt agent mode. And the pricing is not great for individual users.
I hope the great product continues.
These numbers sound like from their internal testing instead of from real customer base.
Who is paying? No clue, must be big in China.
I skipped going to their hackathon :')
But I am still surprised it's at $100mm ARR. I had thought the company had died after their initial hyped launch and didn't see anyone talking about or using the company at all since then...and we play around with a lot of AI tools. I wonder who their customers are.
Bytedance recently launched a similar product in China and caused quite a stir, local phone brands are jostling for partnerships, the AI agent phone.
Meta probably don't want to miss the next thing, even if it turned out to be a dud.
Yes this is an argument from morality fundamentally. I guess I want to live in a society that rewards being productive and making others better. Not essentially theft a step or two removed.
hate only comes from below!
- Erik Meijer
https://x.com/headinthebox/status/2005873104317497426?s=20
I found Erik's takes on this is interesting.
They’re reportedly at ~$100M ARR, implying about $8.3–8.5M in monthly revenue (ARR = last month * 12).
At the same time, they claim to have processed 147T+ tokens. For context, pricing that volume on something like Sonnet 4.5 would come out to roughly $500M in API costs. They likely offset a chunk of that with open models, but for higher-quality outputs, they’re still paying meaningful amounts to Claude / OpenAI / Google.
Hard to make those numbers work without a lot of capital or an exit.
2 billion is the price.
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