“The Manus Marketing Madness” by Zvi

While at core there is ‘not much to see,’ it is, in two ways, a sign of things to come.

Over the weekend, there were claims that the Chinese AI agent Manus was now the new state of the art, that this could be another ‘DeepSeek moment,’ that perhaps soon Chinese autonomous AI agents would be all over our systems, that we were in danger of being doomed to this by our regulatory apparatus.

Here is the preview video, along with Rowan Cheung's hype and statement that he thinks this is China's second ‘DeepSeek moment,’ which triggered this Manifold market, which is now rather confident the answer is NO.

That's because it turns out that Manus appears to be a Claude wrapper (use confirmed by a cofounder, who says they also use Qwen finetunes), using a jailbreak and a few dozen tools, optimized for the GAIA [...]

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Outline:

(02:15) What They Claim Manus Is: The Demo Video

(05:06) What Manus Actually Is

(11:54) Positive Reactions of Note

(16:51) Hype!

(22:17) What is the Plan?

(24:21) Manus as Hype Arbitrage

(25:42) Manus as Regulatory Arbitrage (1)

(33:10) Manus as Regulatory Arbitrage (2)

(39:42) What If? (1)

(41:01) What If? (2)

(42:22) What If? (3)

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First published:
March 10th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ijSiLasnNsET6mPCz/the-manus-marketing-madness

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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