I found it worse than alternatives in the similar space (Claude, genspark, kagi research, etc.) and slightly baffling they were being acquired at a $2B valuation in the first place.
IMO I disagree. I find the built in harness (database, browser use, etc.) quite good.
The only downside (and a big one) is that by not being natively offered by OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. you're paying @ API billing and not plan billing, which makes it less appealing. (Of course Manus has a wrapper around this w some token system, but it ends up being expensive)
I found there Deep Research quite good in terms of browsing the web, better than Gemini's. Though it blew through ~40$ in one task so it was very expensive, probably running at insane margins.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 21.0 ms ] threadI 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.
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)
It's crazy how short it's hype cycle lasted
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.