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.
> 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.
> People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing went viral to demonstrate the point.
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.
> People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing
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.
I am also Chinese and AI user.
Manus is excellent, and it's hard to find a rival when it comes to making PPTs.
The effect of wild search is exaggerated.
The hype from official accounts is one thing, and the overwhelming scam comments on social media are another; neither is accurate.
It has been almost a year. If Manus were really as simple as just getting Open Manus up and running, we should have seen many similar products.
But unfortunately, there's only one Manus.
Manus attempted to ride the wave of DeepSeek and hired an army of influencers inside and outside of China, especially inside, to hype it up as the second coming of DeepSeek, even though they didn’t target the Chinese domestic market (as you correctly pointed out). IIRC it quickly became a joke in about two weeks after it became obvious that they were a thin layer on top of Claude and all marketing. I don’t know how they maneuvered into the current acquisition (feasting on Zuck’s fomo?), but saying “they always have great reputation in the AI industry” is laughable. This kind of garbage damages your reputation by loose association, you should be mad at them, not commenters.
Edit: Actually, the announcement doesn’t say anything about valuation, so it’s not even clear it’s a successful exit.
Riding a wave is fine. Stealing someone else’s clout and falsely advertising your product is not. This applies to every other shitty AI company with little to offer on top of someone else’s foundational model, regardless of origin country. It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.
Are they the only grifters? No, not by a long shot. Are they the only ones ridiculed? No.
> It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.
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?
It has nothing to do with being Chinese. The fact that the founder with previous connections is exactly what people are suggesting is a problem.
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.
If it has nothing to do with being Chinese founded, then why it stated obviously baseless statements without objections until myself pointed out the facts. I mean, manus is top tier by any measure in the startup scene, and someone just say that it's a joke, then sane people's immediate reaction should be asking why, right?
Why suddenly it becomes automatically accepted, other than being a Chinese founded startup, tell me, what else can prompts such mental inconsistency?
I am surprised the CEO does not understand the dynamic of his business. An open source project replicating your product is always a boost to the business. There is no case where that's not the case. The OSS is essentially the minatenance free free tier of the paid product.
I went to a YC event where the founder of a multi-billion dollar open source SaaS said pretty much the opposite and tried to drill home how strategic the choice needs to be for the company to survive.
Nah, their moat is making the software as fiddly and ops heavy as possible. I really like gitlab but having set it up myself several times now, it's kinda a mess and they're not incentivized to make it decent.
Are you not familiar with China's relentless obsession with education and excellence? The cutthroat competition in business, the insane persistence in long-term planning and execution, the vast land of rich treasure underground, the emoumous long history of singular view of history and ancestry?
All these are traits of greatness.
And they have the brutal struggle from external invasion and internal turmoil since 1800s, those hard time breed generations of strong man, men who not only endure physical hardership, intellectual struggles, and spiritual torment, they embrace it, treat them as enjoyable and rewarding. They not only are instant in action, they are also ruthless in reflection. They dire to challenge the strongest coalition of power when they were just gained independence, they are also totally ok to subdue to the same super power when they decide so, without much of a mental conflicting, while still maintaining a unwavering commitment to greatness beyond anyone else's imagination.
China is bound to be the overlord of the nations on earth. That or it vanquish itself in its pursuit of that destiny.
Kensington make multiple trackballs that are ambidextrous. I use both the wireless and wired (on laptop and desktop respectively) versions of their “Expert Mouse” model for a fair few years now.
AI created openapi is like mud house on beach, the first wave will destroy the whole thing into pieces beyond memory can remember it's original ugly shape...
Yeah, I have a rule to tell the agent to not write to any of our OpenAPI specs, it reliably mangles them and then gets stuck trying to unmangle them. I get better results modifying the specs myself and using that as context for the agent so it better understands what I want.
It's very true that any vibe code is immediately legacy after they are generated. In other words, they are incarnations of foreign minds, things from a realm that is shuttered from my access, and they are giant pile of code that is beyond immediate recognition to any human engineers.
Yes, with VideoSDK's Real-Time AI Agents, you can control the TTS output tone, either via prompt engineering (if your TTS provider supports it, like ElevenLabs) or by integrating custom models that support tonal control directly. Our modular pipeline architecture makes it easy to plug in providers like ElevenLabs and pass tone/style prompts dynamically per utterance.
So if you're building AI companions and want them to sound calm, excited, empathetic, etc., you can absolutely prompt for those tones in real time, or even switch voices or tones mid-conversation based on context or user emotion.
Let us know what you're building. Happy to dive deeper into tone control setups or help debug a specific flow!
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
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