{"id":1333,"date":"2025-03-14T11:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-14T12:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/?p=1333"},"modified":"2025-03-28T11:49:37","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T11:49:37","slug":"chinas-new-ai-agent-manus-calls-its-own-shots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/14\/chinas-new-ai-agent-manus-calls-its-own-shots\/","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s new AI agent Manus calls its own shots"},"content":{"rendered":"
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China introduced the invite-only AI agent Manus this week.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Modern large language models are really good at a lot of tasks, like coding, essay writing, translation, and research. But there are still a lot of basic tasks, especially in the \u201cpersonal assistant\u201d realm, that the most highly trained AIs in the world remain hopeless at. <\/p>\n

You can\u2019t ask ChatGPT or Claude \u201corder me a burrito from Chipotle\u201d and get one, let alone \u201cbook me a train from New York to Philadelphia.\u201d OpenAI and Anthropic both offer AIs that can view your screen, move your cursor, and do some things on your computer as if they were a person (through their \u201cOperator\u201d and \u201cComputer Use\u201d functions, respectively). <\/p>\n

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This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter<\/a>.<\/h2>\n

Sign up here<\/a> to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

That such \u201cAI agents<\/a>\u201d sometimes work, sort of, is about the strongest thing you can say for them right now. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. One of Anthropic\u2019s early investors is James McClave, whose BEMC Foundation helps fund Future Perfect<\/a>. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)<\/p>\n

This week, China launched a competitor: the AI agent Manus<\/a>. It produced a blizzard<\/a> of glowing posts and testimonials from highly selected influencers, along with some impressive website demos.<\/p>\n

Here is Manus building an excellent personal website<\/a> with almost no prompting. Here is Manus creating a detailed personal itinerary for a trip<\/a>. Manus creating animations and a lesson plan for a middle school science class<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Manus is invite-only (and while I submitted a request for the tool, it hasn\u2019t been granted), so it\u2019s hard to tell from the outside how representative these highly selected examples are. After a few days of Manus fervor, though, the bubble popped a little and some more moderate reviews started coming out<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Manus, the growing consensus holds, is worse than OpenAI\u2019s DeepResearch at research tasks; but better than Operator or Computer Use at personal assistant tasks. It\u2019s a step forward toward something important \u2014 AIs that can take action beyond the chatbot window \u2014 but it’s not a shocking out-of-nowhere advance.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most importantly, Manus\u2019s usefulness for you will be sharply limited if you don\u2019t trust a Chinese company you\u2019ve never heard of with your payment information so it can book things on your behalf. And you probably shouldn\u2019t. <\/p>\n

The agents are arriving<\/h2>\n

When I first wrote about the risks<\/a> of powerful AI systems displacing or destroying humanity, one very reasonable question was this: How could an AI act against humanity, when they really don\u2019t act<\/em> at all? <\/p>\n

This reasoning is right, as far as current technology goes. Claude or ChatGPT, which just respond to user prompts and don\u2019t act independently in the world, can\u2019t execute on a long-term plan; everything they do is in response to a prompt, and almost all that action takes place within the chat window.<\/p>\n

But AI was never going to remain as a purely responsive tool simply because there is so much potential for profit in agents. People have been trying for years to create AIs that are built out of language models, but which make decisions independently, so that people can relate to them more like an employee or an assistant than like a chatbot. <\/p>\n

Generally, this works by creating a small internal hierarchy of language models, like a little AI company. One of the models is carefully prompted and in some cases fine-tuned to do large-scale planning. It comes up with a long-term plan, which it delegates to other language models. Various sub-agents check their results and change approaches when one sub-agent fails or reports problems.<\/p>\n

The concept is simple, and Manus is far from the first to try it. You may remember that last year we had Devin<\/a>, which was marketed as a junior software engineering employee. It was an AI agent that you interacted with via Slack to give tasks, and which it would then work on achieving without further human input except, ideally, of the kind a human employee might occasionally need. <\/p>\n

The economic incentives to build something like Manus or Devin are overwhelming. Tech companies pay junior software engineers as much as $100,000 a year<\/a> or more. An AI that could actually provide that value would be stunningly profitable. Travel agents, curriculum developers, personal assistants \u2014 these are all fairly well-paid jobs, and an AI agent could in principle be able to do the work at a fraction of the cost, without needing breaks, benefits or vacations. <\/p>\n

But Devin turned out to be overhyped<\/a>, and didn\u2019t work well enough for the market it was aiming at. It\u2019s too soon to say whether Manus represents enough of an advance to have real commercial staying power, or whether, like Devin, its reach will exceed its grasp.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll say that it appears Manus works better than anything that has come before. But just working better isn\u2019t enough \u2014 to trust an AI to spend your money or plan your vacation, you\u2019ll need extremely high reliability. As long as Manus remains tightly limited in availability, it\u2019s hard to say if it will be able to offer that. My best guess is that AI agents that  seamlessly work are still a year or two away \u2014 but only a year or two.<\/p>\n

The China angle<\/h2>\n

Manus isn\u2019t just the latest and greatest attempt at an AI agent.<\/p>\n

It is also the product of a Chinese company, and much of the coverage<\/a> has dwelled on the Chinese angle. Manus is clearly proof that Chinese companies aren’t just imitating what\u2019s being built here in America, as they\u2019ve often been accused of doing<\/a>, but improving on it.<\/p>\n

That conclusion shouldn\u2019t be shocking to anyone who is aware of China\u2019s intense interest in AI. It also raises questions about whether we will be thoughtful about exporting all of our personal and financial data<\/a> to Chinese companies that are not meaningfully accountable to US regulators or US law. <\/p>\n

Installing Manus on your computer gives it a lot of access to your computer \u2014 it\u2019s hard for me to figure out the exact limits on its access or the security of its sandbox when I can\u2019t install it myself. <\/p>\n

One thing we\u2019ve learned in digital privacy debates is that a lot of people will do this without thinking about the implications if they feel Manus offers them enough convenience. And as the TikTok fight made clear<\/a>, once millions of Americans love an app, the government will face a steep uphill battle in trying to restrict it or oblige it to follow data privacy rules. <\/p>\n

But there are also clear reasons Manus came out of a Chinese company and not out of, say, Meta \u2014 and they\u2019re the very reasons we might prefer to use AI agents from Meta. Meta is subject to US liability law. If its agent makes a mistake and spends all your money on website hosting, or if it steals your Bitcoin or uploads your private photos, Meta will probably be liable. For all of these reasons, Meta (and its US competitors) are being cautious in this realm.<\/p>\n

I think caution is appropriate, even as it may be insufficient. Building agents that act independently on the internet is a big deal, one that poses major safety questions, and I\u2019d like us to have a robust legal framework about what they can do and who is ultimately accountable. <\/p>\n

But the worst of all possible worlds is a state of uncertainty that punishes caution and encourages everyone to run agents that have no accountability at all. We have a year or two to figure out how to do better. Let\u2019s hope Manus prompts us to get to work on not just building those agents, but building the legal framework that will keep them safe.<\/p>\n

A version of this story originally appeared in the <\/em>Future Perfect<\/strong><\/em><\/a> newsletter. <\/em>Sign up here!<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

China introduced the invite-only AI agent Manus this week. Modern large language models are really good at a lot of tasks, like coding, essay writing, translation, and research. But there are still a lot of basic tasks, especially in the \u201cpersonal assistant\u201d realm, that the most highly trained AIs in the world remain hopeless at.  […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1336,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-innovation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1333"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1339,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333\/revisions\/1339"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/asian-idol.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}