
Mint Primer: AI power shift: Can China close the gap with the US?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. If Chinese AI lab Deepseek shook the industry with its open-source, budget-friendly reasoning model earlier this year, another Chinese startup, Monica, is impressing many with its new general-purpose AI agentic model, Manus. Are there lessons for India? Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) lab DeepSeek disrupted AI with its low-cost reasoning R1 model this year, prompting OpenAI to respond with o3 mini and GPT-4.5.
Now, another Chinese startup Monica has introduced Manus, an autonomous AI agent that’s been dubbed the “second DeepSeek moment". Manus can not only analyse and plan but also execute complex tasks without human intervention. In just seven days, its waiting list has grown to 2 million.
Currently in beta, you need an invitation code to access Manus, a model that signals China’s growing challenge to the US’s AI dominance. Also read | Can Musk factor, brand hype, Airtel-Jio partnerships boost Starlink’s services? ‘Non-agentic’ systems like basic chatbots respond with scripted answers. AI agents initiate actions and take their own decisions.
Consider an AI trading system that analyses market trends, makes investment decisions and adjusts its strategy based on performance. They have become smarter and more efficient with generative AI (GenAI) models that help them generate and respond to users in natural languages. Gartner expects AI agents to handle 80% of customer service issues by 2029, cutting operational costs by 30%.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts AI will generate nearly all codes within a year. Altindex.com shows despite DeepSeek gaining traction, ChatGPT clocked 40.5 million downloads in January—50% more than DeepSeek and Google Gemini together. DeepSeek boasted 17.6
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