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Manus is a generic thin wrapper over a strong Western model (Sonnet 3.7), if a bit better executed than most, and I am quite unhappy about this squandering of DeepSeek's cultural victory. The developers are not deeply technical and have instead invested a lot into hype, with invites to influencers and creating a secondary invite market, cherrypicked demos aimed at low value add SEO-style content creation (eg “write a course on how to grow your audience on X”) and pretty UX. Its performance on GAIA is already almost replicated by this opensource repo. This is the China we know and don't very much love, the non-DeepSeek baseline: tacky self-promotion, jumping on trends, rent-seeking, mystification. In my tests is hallucinates a lot – even in tasks where naked Sonnet can catch those same hallucinations.
The real analogy to DeepSeek is that, like R1 was the first time laymen used to 4o-mini or 3.5-turbo level slop got a glimpse of a SoTA reasoner in a free app, this is the first time laymen have been exposed to a strong-ish agent system, integrating all features that make sense at this stage – web browsing, pdf parsing, code sandbox, multi-document editing… but ultimately it's just a wrapper bringing out some lower bound of the underlying LLM's latent capability. Accordingly it has no moat, and does not benefit China particularly.
Ah well. R2 will wash all that away.
It is interesting, however, that people seemed to have no clue just how good and useful LLMs already are, probably due to lack of imagination. They are not really chatbot machines, they can execute sophisticated operations on any token sequences, if you just give them the chance to do so.
Can you expand on this? Which hidden capabilities are you referring to? I've been a daily user of LLMs since early ChatGPT came out, and I'm not so sure what do you mean here.
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