Manus: AI version of hao123

Regarding the controversy surrounding Manus, the attitudes of the technology community and ordinary users are currently polarized.

Let’s first talk about why it is so popular in China?

Slogans like " amazing the world " and " national achievement " that have been all over the Internet overnight look like the tactics used by some mobile phone brands to beat Apple back then .

The invitation codes were sold for tens of thousands of yuan by scalpers, which directly reminds people of the four words "hunger marketing" .

Some self-media outlets released similar copy at the same time, and even the promotional videos seemed to be copied and pasted. It is hard not to suspect that this wave of operations was a marketing carnival planned by a team.

Although the official explanation is that the server could not sustain the service, they adopted the invitation system , but users are not buying it!

After all, OpenAl also used an invitation system in its early days, but they didn’t drive up the price of the code to sky-high levels!

In addition, senior executives of major domestic companies urgently met with the Butterfly Effect company behind Manus. This situation is more like a stress response after capital smelled the trend, rather than pure technology worship.

It's strangely cold abroad, what's the problem?

The YouTube video has 50,000 views, but only 400 Twitter comments.

Compared with the overwhelming discussion in the country, this is like heaven and hell.

Industry insiders analyzed that foreign KOLs did not set the pace at all, and the popularity could not be generated just by relying on Chinese users to entertain themselves.

What's even more embarrassing is that the team allegedly approached a company to do domestic public relations, but was denied by the other party, which instead confirmed speculation about the popularity of domestic special supplies .

To put it bluntly, foreign users have seen too many AI products. Manus has neither disruptive technology nor down-to-earth publicity, so naturally it fails to arouse their interest.

Is the technology effective? Here lies the controversy

Internal test users complained that Manus was a super-stitched monster.

Financial analysis relies on a single data source, and complex tasks still require manual cleanup, which is far from the fully autonomous nature advertised .

Some programmers have disassembled it and found that it is essentially a package and integration of existing technologies (such as virtual machines and multi-agent scheduling).

The level of engineering optimization is far from reaching the stage of qualitative change.

A professor from a certain university was even more blunt: The core technology breakthrough is not as good as DeepSeek. At this stage, it is just an executive assistant and is far from being truly universal!

However, some investors feel that it is not easy to encapsulate large models to make practical products. After all, not all companies can afford the cost of developing their own models.

The computing power cost is so high that it discourages ordinary people from doing it. One task costs 2 US dollars, and more complicated ones can directly soar to millions of tokens. This price is not only for individual users, but also for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Compared with OpenAl's doctoral-level Agent, which charges a monthly fee of $20,000, Manus seems cheap, but the problem is that its claimed versatility requires high-frequency use to reflect its value, and the high cost greatly reduces its practicality.

What’s even more heartbreaking is that the journalists who tried it couldn’t even complete their tasks, and the server crashed all the time. Who would dare to pay for such an experience?

So is it a technological miracle or just a marketing trick?

The current Manus is more like a carefully designed semi-finished product launch conference, with hunger marketing to raise expectations, KOL hype to create a sense of scarcity, and then binding with DeepSeek to gain popularity.

This combination of measures has indeed made it a well-known presence in China, but its technical foundation is not strong enough, its computing power costs cannot be reduced, and it cannot be promoted in overseas markets. These shortcomings cannot be made up by marketing alone.

The founder said that brand will be the moat in the future , which sounds like he is looking for a way out for his technical shortcomings in advance.

But then again, the fact that it has prompted major companies such as Tencent and ByteDance to urgently develop similar products at least shows that Manus has touched the itch of the market.

As for whether it can go from being an internet celebrity to being a long-lasting celebrity , it depends on whether it can make the pie a reality in the future.