Manus AI – Music Maker

Monica demonstrates an advance in orchestration, not AGI.

• Manus AI is the latest AI story out of China but once the hype has died down, I suspect the real story will be how Monica has made an advance in teaching agents to execute tasks rather than making them more intelligent.
• Manus AI is the latest product from a Chinese AI company called Monica based in Shenzhen that until recently has focused on providing a range of generative AI services using foundation models from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Mistral and so on.
• However, on 6^th March it previewed Manus AI which is similar to the Deep Research products that everyone is launching, but with the supposed ability to take independent action to complete tasks more thoroughly.
• Once again, if this is an accurate description of Manus’ capabilities, then it represents a big step forward going from assisting humans to complete tasks to completing the task without human involvement.
• Manus appears to have access to its own cloud-based computer that is running Linux with access to the command line meaning that as a superuser, it can execute tasks like a human would rather than make a series of recommendations.
• This looks to me to be a big part of the innovation in taking the AI agent from recommending to doing.
• In the launch video, the model is seen screening resumes, conducting real estate research and stock analysis.
• The best example of the augmented functionality is real estate research where areas of New York are screened on certain criteria such as schools and crime and then goes on to write a program to calculate affordability ending up with a list of viable options.
• Other examples on the website (see here) include creating a report on the film industry and analysing US naval tactics during World War II.
• Manus has also been tested on the GAIA Benchmark which is designed to test an AI’s capability to do real-world tasks.
• Here, it comfortably beats OpenAI’s DeepResearch on all levels of difficulty.
• It is important to note that unlike DeepSeek R1 and Alibaba’s QwQ-32B, Manus is not available in open source meaning that none of these claims can be easily verified.
• The architecture of Manus is also not very clear, but it appears that, like DeepSeek, it is using a mixture of experts structure but whether it has been able to make any resource savings like DeepSeek is claiming is unclear at this stage.
• Yichao “Peak” Ji, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist states that Manus would not have been possible without the open source community meaning that Llama, Mistral and others have probably been heavily used and distilled in the creation of Manus.
• Peak has also committed to giving back to the open-source community, but it will be a little more complex than just uploading the model.
• As a mixture of experts model, Manus uses several distinct models that Monica has fine-tuned to enable the service that Manus provides.
• It is some of these sub-models that have been “fine-tuned for Manus” that Monica will be contributing to open source as opposed to the whole Manus system itself.
• The idea here is to drive the adoption of Manus as an AI assistant rather than to allow anyone to download the whole system tinker with it and recreate an instance on Manus on a separate system.
• This could be for both business and geopolitical reasons as like DeepSeek, I suspect that the real IP in Manus is in how it was created and trained meaning that uploading some of the sub-models gives very little away.
• Monica will not be making anything available to open source just yet, which is probably a sign that the company is still in the process of getting a license to export the sub-models.
• This also means that 100% of Manus is running in China and everyone who uses Manus and submits data to it for analysis or execution of a task is sending data to China.
• China’s national security laws mean that the Chinese state has access to all of this data whenever it wants which I suspect is going to lead to rapid bans on Manus by companies whose employees are already using AI to aid their daily tasks.
• Until a few days ago, Monica was a small Chinese company that hardly anyone had heard of meaning that, like DeepSeek, it has been operating on a tiny fraction of the resources that OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and so on have access to.
• While the internet is going wild for this latest AI release from China, problems are cropping up.
• There are reports of crashes and failure to complete tasks, but this could be due to the server being under massive strain.
• However, it has also failed to book flights, reserve tables at restaurants and was not as good at writing code as some of its Western competitors.
• This tells me that Monica has created and trained Manus for a specific series of task categories but the minute that one tries to take it out of its comfort zone, it gets into trouble.
• This means that it is not a step towards super-intelligent machines but is an excellent implementation of software that makes the AI we already have more useful.
• RFM Research has concluded that one of the difficulties in making AI agents is all of the messy software plumbing that will allow the agents to access the apps, APIs, websites and so on to carry out tasks on the user’s behalf.
• With the use of a Linux superuser command prompt, Monica appears to have made an advance in working out a good way to deal with this difficult task, but this is not a step towards superintelligent machines.
• It is, however, another PR coup for China that is doing a very good job of proving that it is a contender in AI and it is here I think the struggle will be fought for the next couple of years.
• The USA will find it harder to contain China in AI as it has in semiconductors although the edge in semiconductors is going to be an issue when China wants to ramp to real scale.
• This is another impressive development from China but with no real progress towards super-intelligent machines, the stage is still set for some form of correction in terms of expectations and valuations across the whole AI industry.