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  • Hacker News
  • Bro I remeber manus private beta miss it
    by aslfan
  • I bet Demis wishes the UK had blocked the DeepMind acquisition by Google. He will have a lot of time to think now that he has been kicked out of his own company
    by bossyTeacher
  • He needed Google money to run the company.
    by sumedh
  • Switched to avi.run already. But loved Manus initially.
    by fitzgera1d
  • It looks interesting, but to be honest - when I wanted to connect Google apps I got warned that the developer is not verified. That's a bad look.
    by adamhepner
  • I expect this decupling will affect certain users. Can certain users speak up about this? I'm certain that certain users use Manus and are users on this certain site.
    by capten
  • Likely a bad translation from the original Chinese version?

    That being said it’s the first time I see Manus, they seem to have the perfect AI startup tagline for a new season of HBO’s Silicon Valley:

    “Our Mission - To extend human reach by giving everyone the code to leverage their life. Our Product - We build general AI agents as the Action Engine for life.”

    by dgellow
  • I don’t actually care about this flash-in-the-pan company, but the name Manus is the reason startups should have a branding designer or branding agency do branding work before they’re too recognizable to change without throwing people off, but not large enough for anyone to learn about it organically (e.g. Meta, X). I can’t help but read it like ‘anus’ with an M in front of it.

    People on the technical side of the business often insist people don’t care things like that, but when non-technical people are looking at a few services that seem roughly equivalent to them, even subconsciously, appeal plays a big role. And M’Anus is not appealing.

    The fantasy that you’re building something so useful it will sell itself is magical thinking. Yet another reason AI will never replace designers— just screw up the job market for them.

    by DrewADesign
  • > I can’t help but read it like ‘anus’ with an M in front of it.

    Duck Duck Go is really what's wrong with modern dating culture.

    by frankacter
  • Puzzling that Meta didn't see this one coming. Wonder if there was a break up fee.
    by rasheed106
  • Anyone have info on whose regulatory restrictions they are referring to?
    by stephantul
  • I would guess EU? Technically a bunch of countries don't allow data to be with Manus aka Chinese cloud services.

    For instance, India has quite literally banned Alibaba Cloud and related.

    by minraws
  • China prevented the founders from leaving the country
    by rangestransform
  • Almost certainly Chinese national-security and technology-transfer restrictions around strategic AI tech. China’s NDRC formally prohibited the acquisition and ordered the transaction unwound.
    by kristianc
  • The Chinese government blocked Meta’s acquisition.

    https://archive.is/yFCIt

    by galaxy_quest
  • What does this product do? There's absolutely nothing on the main screen of the app except a chat box.
    by willdr
  • Money. They have AI on the pitch deck and therefore make obscure amounts of money.
    by nikanj
  • Perhaps unfairly my interest suddenly dropped to zero when the acquisition was announced. The hype also seemed gone?
    by econ
  • Absolutely. Haven't heard anyone talk about recently.
    by iamcoder18
  • This has to be one of the most flash in the pan, 5 minutes of fame company in a long time

    It's crazy how short it's hype cycle lasted

    by nylonstrung
  • Does anyone here use Manus actively?

    I found it worse than alternatives in the similar space (Claude, genspark, kagi research, etc.) and slightly baffling they were being acquired at a $2B valuation in the first place.

    by trouve_search
  • I use it for when I am on my iPad and am not at my computer. It is very good for computer use. That along with Minimax agent.
    by SpyCoder77
  • I like it and use it regularly. Maybe I don't get other harnesses, but in my experience Manus gets shit done, whereas I have to constantly babysit other tools.
    by adamhepner
  • I found there Deep Research quite good in terms of browsing the web, better than Gemini's. Though it blew through ~40$ in one task so it was very expensive, probably running at insane margins.
    by jatins
  • I use it alot. It's great for like researching deep on a topic. I also accidentally found that it's better at taking my directions and transferring that well to image generation especially with iteration. When I try my own iterations directly it never really lands
    by potato66
  • Valuations are significantly leveraged compared to actual user metrics. My impression of Manus was that, like Perplexity, some users were using it to get around firewalls/regulation.
    by alansaber
  • IMO I disagree. I find the built in harness (database, browser use, etc.) quite good.

    The only downside (and a big one) is that by not being natively offered by OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. you're paying @ API billing and not plan billing, which makes it less appealing. (Of course Manus has a wrapper around this w some token system, but it ends up being expensive)

    by meric_
  • Manus did a lot of harness work to make up for gaps in Opus 4.5 tier models. I tried it for a time - they had a great deep research/PDF generation pipeline, parallelization, etc. The bitter lesson has now come for them: the latest models no longer have these gaps and the entire premise of having a unique product focus on this area is no longer relevant. Even Ant/OAI have let their "Deep Research" capabilities fall by the wayside, you can largely get the same result by asking for subagents or simply "keep going" style prompting.
    by extr
  • ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork (and OpenClaw) are established now - they weren't at all in December 2025 when Meta tried to buy Manus.
    by simonw