"Deepseek Moment" of Manus Wuhan Headquarters' AI application field investigation or false marketing frenzy?

Another domestically produced AI application unexpectedly went viral. Earlier this morning, domestic AI startup "Butterfly Effect" released a product named Manus, an AI Agent that can autonomously complete tasks such as screening resumes, researching real estate, and analyzing stocks, as demonstrated in the product's video. Users can watch the entire process of these tasks being completed. Although Manus has not been officially launched yet, with only a few tech KOLs who received invitation codes leading the way, Manus quickly exploded on the Chinese internet: its official website crashed due to a surge in traffic; invitation codes for Manus were being sold on the second-hand market for up to 50,000 yuan. The capital market also experienced a frenzy, with over 150 AI intelligent stocks in A-shares surging, some even hitting the daily limit or going up by over 10%. However, with the sudden explosion in popularity before many users had the chance to experience it, doubts and questions about Manus also arose: is this a DeepSeek moment for AI applications, or just a marketing frenzy built on anticipation? With these questions in mind, reporters from the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" visited the headquarters office of Manus in Wuhan this afternoon. Visit to Manus Headquarters in Wuhan From the office environment on-site, Butterfly Effect appears to be a company with a very internet-centered, and even a bit geeky, culture - no reception desk, no large logo, the sound of keyboards being typed being the main background noise in the office. According to discussions with the company during the visit, the overwhelming response to Manus exceeded the team's expectations. The server resources were prepared at a level similar to demos in the industry before the launch, but they were quickly overwhelmed. "The registration port even experienced violent hacking attempts, and the team stayed up all night, dealing with various issues. They are currently operating at overcapacity." It was revealed that the Manus project was jointly developed by teams in Beijing and Wuhan and began with the project research by the Beijing team a year ago. After a year of development, Manus had taken shape, and after several months of internal testing, the team was pleasantly surprised with the results, leading to the release of the demo version early this morning. The team stated that Manus is currently in the demo stage of internal testing and has not yet started any marketing plans or opened any channels for obtaining invitation codes through payment. Regarding the resale of invitation codes on idle fish, the official company statement has clarified that these are false information and warns users not to trust them. Currently, the team is working to improve the user experience during the internal testing phase, with significant room for improvement in areas such as model hallucination, deliverable friendliness, and operational speed. Due to limited server capacity, they will continue to use the invitation code mechanism for now. "We hope to provide users with a more stable internal testing version next and we hope that users will not have high expectations, giving the team more time to improve and perfect the product." The establishment of the Butterfly Effect's teams in Wuhan and Beijing may be related to the founders' experiences. Public information shows that the founder of Butterfly Effect, Xiao Hong, graduated from the Software Engineering School of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, and the co-founder and chief scientist Ji Yichao graduated from Beijing Information Technology University, both of them being serial entrepreneurs. Prior to this, Xiao Hong founded Nightingale Technology, focusing on the development and promotion of applications in the WeChat ecosystem, receiving investments worth billions from companies like Tencent. Products included Yiban Assistant, Weiban Assistant, among others. Ji Yichao received angel investments from True Fund and Redstone China for developing Mammoth Browser and was named one of the "30 under 30 entrepreneurs" in China and America. In March 2012, he appeared on the cover of Forbes China edition. The DeepSeek moment for AI agents? DeepSeek's innovation in large model pedestal costs, inside and outside the industry, has accelerated expectations for the explosion of AI applications and deepened anxiety over the replacement of human labor. With these two emotions driving forward, Manus, a tangible AI assistant introduced through a demo video, quickly ignited public opinion and the capital market. Regarding the true technical strength and product capability of Manus, an AI domain VC investor told the reporter from the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" that based on the current demo, Manus is a highly developed Agent product, but the actual product threshold remains to be verified. "The technical architecture of Manus is fundamentally based on systematic engineering optimizations of the large model pedestal, achieved through constructing a multi-agent collaboration framework for task decomposition and dynamic scheduling, combined with deep prompting engineering for precise intent alignment, and designed multiple-tier environment adaptation mechanisms for different application scenarios, ultimately resulting in a highly engineered integration solution for complex missions." They further stated that if the overall product threshold is not high, we may see similar products from internet giants in one or two months. A technical expert from a large model application enterprise expressed that there are already many Agent tools on the market, including Monica which was previously developed by Butterfly Effect, and it will depend on the actual usage results of the product to see if it can stand out among many competitors. Monica is an AI assistant mainly targeting overseas markets introduced by Butterfly Effect, in the form of a browser extension where users can directly access various mainstream models. Another senior product specialist in the internet industry told the reporter from the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" that Manus' core capability lies in understanding user needs. "It doesn't just deliver text in the end, but uses code to generate various task-specific results, covering documents, web pages, icons, and even videos. This allows users to intuitively obtain the desired results and verify the final deliverables." However, he also admitted that without sufficient moat, Manus may give birth to more similar products and face intense competition. Possibly influenced by Monica's overseas experience, the promotional video, official website, and contact information for Manus are all in English. However, in terms of impact, Manus seems to have less influence on the English-speaking community compared to the Chinese internet. The demo video on YouTube has received 13,000 views and 113 comments. Its official account on X platform has garnered a total of 350,000 views.And 430 comments.According to the experts in the above technologies, the explosion of Manus is to some extent a manifestation of anticipated priorities. "If the Agent performs well, the upper limit is very high and the value is very large, so there are high expectations from both inside and outside the industry, including the capital market." This article is reprinted from "Cailianshe", GMTEight editor: Li Fo.