This piece originally appeared at Hyperdimensional.
Last Thursday, the Chinese AI startup Monica released an agent called Manus. In a demo video, co-founder Yichao “Peak” Ji described the system as “the first general AI agent,” capable of doing a wide range of tasks using a computer like a human would. While numerous startups, as well as OpenAI and Anthropic, have released general computer-using agents, the company itself claims superior performance to those products. Many reports from social media seem to agree, though there are notable exceptions.
Manus is not available to the general public as of this writing. Monica has given access to a select group of users—seemingly focused on high-profile influencers. I was not offered an access code, but I was able to use the system for a couple of prompts. My tentative conclusion from that experience—as well as the uses I have seen from others—is that Manus is the best general-purpose computer use agent I have ever tried, though it still suffers from glitchiness, unpredictability, and other problems.
Some have speculated that Manus represents another “DeepSeek moment,” where a Chinese startup is surprisingly competitive with top-tier American offerings. I suspect this analogy confuses more than it clarifies. DeepSeek is a genuine frontier AI lab. They are on a quest to build AGI in the near term, have a deep philosophical conviction about the power of deep learning, and are staffed with a team of what Anthropic Co-Founder Jack Clark has called “unfathomable geniuses.”
