Meta says it is acquiring the Chinese-founded AI firm Manus as it looks to boost the capabilities of its tech. Bloomberg analysts and The Wall Street Journal suggested the purchase could be worth more than $2bn (£1.48bn). Meta said the deal would help improve its own AI by giving people access to agents - tools which can do complex things with minimal user interaction such as planning trips or making presentations. Manus's exceptional talent will join Meta's team to deliver general-purpose agents across our consumer and business products, including Meta AI, it said in a blog post. Barton Crockett, analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, told Reuters it was a natural fit for Meta, which extended into boss Mark Zuckerberg's vision of personal AI using agents.

Its acquisition of Manus is one of the highest-profile yet from Asia's AI startup ecosystem. Meta has acquired an AI startup called Manus -- known for its custom research and website-building agents -- in a deal valued at more than $2 billion, according to . It's reportedly one of the largest acquisitions yet involving a startup nurtured in China's AI ecosystem. Manus arrived in March 2025, shortly after another Chinese AI startup, DeepSeek appeared on the scene. The company (called Butterfly Effect at the time) originally described it as the first general AI agent to perform complex tasks autonomously, rather than just generating ideas.

Tech giant Meta has announced it will buy artificial intelligence startup Manus in a rare crossover of US and Chinese technology amid Washington and Beijing's heated tech rivalry. Meta said the acquisition would see it take over the operation of Manus's self-directing AI agent and integrate the technology into its own products. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said the deal would bring one of the "leading autonomous general-purpose agents" to billions of people worldwide. "Manus's exceptional talent will join Meta's team to deliver general-purpose agents across our consumer and business products, including in Meta AI," the California-based firm said in a statement on Monday. "We're excited to welcome the Manus team and help improve the lives of billions of people and millions of businesses with their technology."

How Yichao "Peak" Ji became a global AI app hitmaker He developed Manus, one of the buzziest AI apps of the year, in the latest project that blends his technical prowess with killer consumer instincts. When Yichao Ji--also known as "Peak"--appeared in a launch video for Manus in March, he didn't expect it to go viral. Speaking in fluent English, the 32-year-old introduced the AI agent built by Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, where he serves as chief scientist. The video was not an elaborate production--it was directed by cofounder Zhang Tao and filmed in a corner of their Beijing office. But something about Ji's delivery, and the vision behind the product, cut through the noise. The product, then still an early preview available only through invite codes, spread across the Chinese internet to the world in a matter of days.

Manus AI is a general-purpose AI agent introduced in early 2025, marking a significant advancement in autonomous artificial intelligence. Developed by the Chinese startup Monica.im, Manus is designed to bridge the gap between "mind" and "hand" - combining the reasoning and planning capabilities of large language models with the ability to execute complex, end-to-end tasks that produce tangible outcomes. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of Manus AI, exploring its core technical architecture, diverse applications across sectors such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, robotics, and gaming, as well as its key strengths, current limitations, and future potential. Positioned as a preview of what lies ahead, Manus AI represents a shift toward intelligent agents that can translate high-level intentions into real-world actions, heralding a new era of human-AI collaboration.

Instead, they're built on top of them, using a workflow-based structure designed to get things done. A lot of these systems also introduce a different way of interacting with AI. Rather than just chatting back and forth with users, they are optimized for managing and executing multistep tasks--booking flights, managing schedules, conducting research--by using external tools and remembering instructions. China could take the lead on building these kinds of agents. The country's tightly integrated app ecosystems, rapid product cycles, and digitally fluent user base could provide a favorable environment for embedding AI into daily life.

"The Big Weekend Show" analyzes the possibilities of artificial intelligence when it comes to influencing voters. If you haven't heard the buzz about Manus yet, it's the new AI model unveiled by a Singapore-based company called Butterfly Effect. It's one of the first truly autonomous AI agents, able to do its own research, make decisions and even carry out plans, all with barely any human oversight. But here's the thing: While all this innovation opens up exciting possibilities, it also brings some serious privacy and security questions. Whether you're eager to try out the latest AI or you'd rather steer clear, it's worth understanding what Manus could mean for your personal data and digital safety.

Despite all the hype, very few people have had a chance to use it. Currently, under 1% of the users on the wait list have received an invite code. MIT Technology Review was able to obtain access to Manus, and when I gave it a test-drive, I found that using it feels like collaborating with a highly intelligent and efficient intern: While it occasionally lacks understanding of what it's being asked to do, makes incorrect assumptions, or cuts corners to expedite tasks, it explains its reasoning clearly, is remarkably adaptable, and can improve substantially when provided with detailed instructions or feedback. Just like its parent company's previous product, an AI assistant called Monica that was released in 2023, Manus is intended for a global audience. English is set as the default language, and its design is clean and minimalist.

High cost and lack of reliability has precluded the widespread adoption of dexterous hands in robotics. Furthermore, the lack of a viable tactile sensor capable of sensing over the entire area of the hand impedes the rich, low-level feedback that would improve learning of dexterous manipulation skills. This paper introduces an inexpensive, modular, robust, and scalable platform -- the DManus -- aimed at resolving these challenges while satisfying the large-scale data collection capabilities demanded by deep robot learning paradigms. Studies on human manipulation point to the criticality of low-level tactile feedback in performing everyday dexterous tasks. The DManus comes with ReSkin sensing on the entire surface of the palm as well as the fingertips. We demonstrate effectiveness of the fully integrated system in a tactile aware task -- bin picking and sorting. Code, documentation, design files, detailed assembly instructions, trained models, task videos, and all supplementary materials required to recreate the setup can be found on http://roboticsbenchmarks.org/platforms/dmanus

Consider this scene from the 2014 film, Ex Machina: A young nerd, Caleb, is in a dim room with a scantily clad femmebot, Kyoko. Nathan, a brilliant roboticist, drunkenly stumbles in and brusquely tells Caleb to dance with the Kyoko-bot. To kick things off, Nathan presses a wall-mounted panel and the room lights shift suddenly to an ominous red, while Oliver Cheatham's disco classic "Get Down Saturday Night" starts to play. Kyoko--who seems to have done this before--wordlessly begins to dance, and Nathan joins his robotic creation in an intricately choreographed bit of pelvic thrusting. The scene suggests that Nathan imbued his robot creation with disco functionality, but how did he choreograph the dance on Kyoko, and why?