With Manus, AI experimentation has burst into the open
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Watching the automatic hand of the Manus AI agent scroll through a dozen browser windows is unsettling. Give it a task that can be accomplished online, such as building up a promotional network of social-media accounts, researching and writing a strategy document, or booking tickets and hotels for a conference, and Manus will write a detailed plan, spin up a version of itself to browse the web, and give it its best shot.
Manus ai is a system built on top of existing models that can interact with the internet and perform a sequence of tasks without deferring to a human user for permission. Its makers, who are based in China, claim to have built the world’s first general AI agent that “turns your thoughts into actions". Yet ai labs around the world have already been experimenting with this “agentic" approach in private.
What makes Manus notable is not that it exists, but that it has been fully unleashed by its creators. A new age of experimentation is here, and it is happening not within labs, but out in the real world. Spend more time using Manus and it becomes clear that it still has a lot further to go to become consistently useful.
Confusing answers, frustrating delays and never-ending loops make the experience disappointing. In releasing it, its makers have obviously prized a job done first over a job done well. This is in contrast to the approach of the big American labs.
Partly because of concerns about the safety of their innovations, they have kept them under wraps, poking and prodding them until they hit a decent version 1.0. OpenAI waited nine months before fully releasing gpt-2 in 2019. Google’s Lamda chatbot was functioning internally in 2020, but the company sat on it for
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