How to Understand Manus

Originally published in Chinese on March 7, 2025. Manus, an AI agent product from a Chinese startup, drew a huge and sharply divided reaction in the first week of March 2025. This is how I read it. The core of the innovation: delivering a finished result Is there innovation in this product? That is the core question, and the answer is yes. The innovation is in changing how users understand what AI can do. It moves past the limits of hardware and the limits of AI capability to the point of delivering a finished result. Lower barriers for users, and an automated task flow Plenty of tutorials online tell you how to build an app by hand and walk you through to the result, but only a small number of people can actually do it. Most lack the skill, and there is a natural resistance to doing it at all. So this product starts from there: it delivers something close to a logic of automatically completing the task.