Today, the AI community has stirred up a wave of excitement. A product named Manus has quickly attracted a lot of attention with its fully English promotional video and invitation code-based release method. This AI Agent developed by a Chinese team is officially referred to as the "world's first general-purpose Agent," seemingly overnight, the Operators from OpenAI and Anthropic have been sidelined. After its release, Manus rapidly sparked a "blow-up" style of dissemination within a small circle, similar to the phenomenon of DeepSeek. However, can Manus really become the next DeepSeek? Let's take a closer look at it.

What Exactly is Manus?

According to Manus's promotional video and official website, it is an AI Agent that can "solve various complex and changing tasks, possess independent thinking and system planning capabilities, and flexibly call tools in a virtual environment to directly deliver complete results." Such descriptions are not uncommon in today's AI Agent products; many AI products self-describe in this way. Manus has not yet been publicly launched and can only be used through invitation codes, with its release method entirely relying on demonstration videos.

In the video demonstration, Manus showcased several specific application scenarios: for example, uploading a compressed file containing multiple resumes, automatically unzipping, analyzing, and providing suggestions based on prompts; organizing real estate information and prices according to user needs; generating analysis reports on Nvidia and Tesla stock prices. Similar functionalities have already been demonstrated by multiple AI products such as OpenAI's Operator, Zhipu AI's Phone Use, and Google Gemini.

From a technical perspective, Manus has not provided a detailed technical report. Some analysts point out that Manus's foundational capabilities may stem from the Claude model, combined with post-training techniques of open-source models, and executed through a series of predefined workflows. Its innovation lies in encapsulating these capabilities in a cloud-based virtual environment and providing services in an asynchronous interaction mode, although this still falls short of the industry's pursuit of a "general AI" goal.

The Problem of "General Agents"

Manus aims to become a "general AI Agent," meaning it not only provides suggestions or answers but can autonomously plan and execute tasks. However, this definition itself poses problems. Powerful models like Claude already possess the ability to handle complex tasks and can complete them through efficient tool calls. Therefore, Manus's functionalities can essentially be achieved through more powerful Agents or large models, even without a specially designed system like Manus.

Moreover, Manus's product positioning is clearly different from traditional AI Assistants. It seems to hope to integrate different tools and Agents through a "virtual environment," making it more automated. While this lowers the technical threshold for users, does it mean that Manus can become a truly general intelligent Agent? After all, the demand for personalized Agents varies greatly among individuals, and whether Manus can adapt to different scenario needs remains an unknown.

Marketing Strategy: Scarcity Marketing and Social Dissemination

Manus's "popularity" is not solely due to technology; its marketing strategy is also a highlight. Through an invitation code mechanism, Manus has quickly sparked a frenzy in the AI community, with some platforms even inflating the price of invitation codes to between 999 yuan and 50,000 yuan. This scarcity marketing strategy draws on classic models from the mobile internet era: limited releases, user competition, and KOL-style evaluations. While this method of dissemination can create topics and heat, whether it can lead to sustained user growth remains to be seen.

However, when we open overseas tech forums and social media, discussions about Manus are relatively quiet. This seems to indicate that, although Manus is very popular in China, many people in the international market may not be swayed by its promotion. It is worth noting that Manus's release seems overly reliant on emotional marketing, attempting to quickly gain attention by leveraging the emotional symbol of "DeepSeek," but this may also mean that its popularity is short-lived and lacks long-term core competitiveness.

The Product Value and Limitations of Manus

From a product design perspective, Manus can be seen as a packaging and optimization of existing Cursor-type AI products. By introducing multiple small models and Agents, it simplifies the user operation process, allowing non-technical users to easily orchestrate and execute complex tasks. However, this approach is not entirely innovative; similar design concepts have appeared in many AI products, such as OpenDevin.

Manus's advantage lies in its ability to package these complex technologies into a more user-friendly product, enabling ordinary users to directly use AI to handle complex tasks. However, its limitations are also evident: first, Manus still relies on predefined workflows, which restricts its flexibility and innovation; second, its operating environment is relatively closed, only functioning within a specific range of software tools, unable to operate like a general operating system that supports various software and applications. Therefore, whether Manus can truly achieve the goal of "general" remains in question.

Future Competition and Development

In the Agent field, Manus is not fighting alone. Competitors like Coze and Dify are also trying to create similar general Agents. More importantly, with the continuous advancement of large model technology, models like Claude 3 and GPT-5 already possess powerful tool-calling capabilities, and in the future, the capabilities of large models may directly swallow the market for Agent-type products. Therefore, whether Manus can stand out in this fiercely competitive market still faces significant challenges.

A more critical point is whether Manus can find a true market positioning. Its goal is to become a "general Agent," but from the current product form, it resembles a highly efficient AI tool platform suitable for specific application scenarios rather than a universally capable AI. If it cannot break through this bottleneck, Manus's market growth may be limited to a relatively narrow niche.

Conclusion

In summary, Manus is a potentially valuable AI product, especially in optimizing user experience and technology packaging, but it is not a technological revolution. Its positioning as a "general AI Agent" remains questionable, and its product design is more of a repackaging within the existing technological framework rather than a breakthrough innovation. Although it has created topics through scarcity marketing and social dissemination, whether it can sustainably attract users will depend on whether it can find unique value in a fiercely competitive market. If Manus can break existing limitations in the future, combining multi-Agent collaboration and more efficient task execution mechanisms, it still has the opportunity to become an important player in the AI field.

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