The emergence of the latest AI (artificial intelligence) agent products in China has promoted the rise of related concepts.

On the evening of March 5, the startup Butterfly Effect released an early preview of its AI agent, Manus, calling it "the world's first general-purpose agent product". In the introductory video, Ji Yichao, co-founder and chief scientist of Monica, called Manus what the team sees as "the next generation of artificial intelligence" and that Manus can "produce results" while other AI "produce ideas". Judging from the introduction, the user only needs to give Manus a simple command, and it can automatically complete complex tasks.

Manus is called "the first general-purpose AI agent" by the team. Source: X Platform

As Ali Tongyi also released an open-source inference model that integrates agent-related capabilities, on the 6th, the concept of A-share AI agents rose sharply, and Lifang Holdings (33030. BJ) 30% up limit, Kute Intelligent (300840. SZ), Hand Information (300170. SZ), Zhiyuan Internet (688369. SH), Dingjie Digital Intelligence (300378. SZ) and other 20% daily limit, Focus Technology (002315. SZ), Zhewen Internet (600986. SH) and other shares with a 10% daily limit.

According to Ji, Manus' name is derived from the Latin "Mens et Manus" (mind and hand). The video shows Manus performing three tasks: screening resumes, picking properties, and analyzing stocks. Even if the user turns off the device, Manus can continue to work on the cloud and provide results when completed. Ji Yichao said that Manus also combines memory and learning functions, which can gradually adapt to the user's preferences over time.

Users can choose to have Manus remember their habits. Source: Manus

For example, in the case of the task of sifting through resumes, after a user uploads multiple resumes, Manus will go through the file and record important information, providing the user with ranking suggestions, relevant candidate resumes and evaluation criteria, as well as a form created according to the user's requirements. During this process, the user can give new instructions at any time, such as adding additional resumes.

In the demo, Manus will actively unwrap the compressed file uploaded by the user. Source: Manus

At the same time, the GAIA benchmark chart released by Manus shows that Manus has surpassed OpenAl's Deep Research, which launched in February this year, in all three difficulty levels. The GAIA benchmark mainly evaluates the performance of AI on real-world problems and is considered one of the best test sets for testing agent systems.

Manus scored higher on the GAIA benchmark than OpenAI Deep Research and previous SOTA models (referring to the best models in the research task). Source: Manus

However, Manus has only released the official website and introduction video so far, and if you want to experience Manus, you need to get an invitation code for the closed beta. On major social platforms, you can see many comments from netizens who want to get an invitation code.

On the 6th, Zhang Tao, a partner of Manus, responded on WeChat Moments that he "completely underestimated everyone's enthusiasm", that the company "has never opened any channel to pay for invitation codes", and "has never invested any marketing budget", "will give priority to ensuring the core experience of existing users, and gradually release invitations in an orderly manner".

Manus did not release the team profile on the official website. Tianyancha shows that Butterfly Effect (Hong Kong) Limited, the company behind Manus, was established in Hong Kong in 2023 and has 100% actual control over Beijing Red Butterfly Technology Co., Ltd. The latter was founded by Xiao Hong in 2022 and has launched Monica, an AI browser plug-in that focuses on overseas markets, and the current legal representative is Feng Qionghua. The change records show that Xiao Hong withdrew as a shareholder of the company in March 2023. Xiao Hong was also associated with 1 Wuhan Nightingale Technology Co., Ltd., which withdrew as a shareholder of the company in December 2024.

At the moment, it seems that only a handful of developers have received Manus beta invitation codes. Some domestic AI practitioners told The Paper that Manus's publicity may be overheated. However, some practitioners said that it is understandable that the team chose to release the invitation code in order to save computing resources, and looked forward to the official launch of the product.

Some foreign media said that after DeepSeek released the R1 model, people's attention to China's AI capabilities is increasing day by day. Judging by the introduction, it seems that Manus is in direct competition with OpenAI, which is working hard to develop AI agents.