Making sense of Manus mania

Read time: under 4 minutes

Welcome back, Superhuman. Manus Mania is in full swing — the Chinese startup dropped a new agent last week that’s so impressive some users are allegedly bidding up to $6,900 for beta access instead of just waiting in line for a free code. Manus AI is giving us major DeepSeek deja-vu, but is it really worth all the hype?

Today’s Insights

• Taiwan’s first LLM, AI job growth, and AI-powered dementia predictions

• China delivers another surprise: Manus AI

• Tutorial: How to build a personalized learning hub with Perplexity Space

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• News, memes, what’s trending on socials, and more

TODAY IN AI

1. Electronics giant builds advanced LLM in just four weeks: Foxconn — the company that manufactures the iPhone, Kindle, Google Pixel, and more — just unveiled FoxBrain, a reasoning model geared toward supply chain management and manufacturing. Trained with an Nvidia supercomputer, it’s the company’s first LLM as well as the first reasoning model to come out of Taiwan. Foxconn will use it internally at first with plans to open up access down the line.

2. Demand for AI expertise keeps growing: Around a quarter of all tech jobs in the US now ask for AI skills — up from around 12% at the start of 2024. Research from the University of Maryland shows that employers are even looking for applicants who can bring AI expertise to non-tech fields like retail, real estate, and HR. At the same time, VC investments have soared to a three-year high thanks to an AI startup boom. At least nine US AI companies have raised at least $100M or more so far in 2025.

1. Researchers use AI to predict dementia years in advance: Researchers at Boston’s Mass General Brigham hospital found that by using AI to analyze patients’ brain activity during sleep, they could predict future cognitive impairments with 77% accuracy. Their model detected “subtle changes in brain wave patterns” for 85% of the patients who went on to develop dementia. The findings could dramatically improve Alzheimer’s outcomes by letting at-risk patients start treatment years earlier than usual.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

Manus AI delivers another ‘DeepSeek moment’

It’s finally sinking in. Months after DeepSeek’s R1 sent the AI industry into a tailspin, China is back with another surprise release — this time, an agent that can build apps, do in-depth research, and screen resumes entirely on its own.

Who’s behind the release? The agent was created by a little-known startup called Butterfly Effect. It’s based in Beijing and Wuhan and has only a few dozen employees.

What’s the big deal? Manus purports to be the first “general AI agent,” beating out OpenAI’s Deep Research on the industry-leading GAIA benchmark. It seems to have been created with relatively little funding and compute, especially compared to US-based AI giants.

How are users reacting?

• Hugging Face’s Victor Mustar claimed it was “the most impressive AI tool [he’s] ever tried.”

• Builder Mckay Wrigley called it “shockingly good” and shared a 15-minute video with his first impressions.

• And now, programmers are even using it to build an “open-source alternative” of itself.

But it’s not without controversy: Some early testers said Manus gets stuck and makes factual errors just like its competitors. They also found signs that Manus is just a “wrapper” built on top of Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 — a theory that the startup’s co-founder seemed to confirm. Fans have shrugged off those concerns though and are already getting excited about how Manus might perform once it upgrades to Claude 3.7.

How can I use it? You can apply for beta access here.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to build a personalized learning hub with Perplexity Space

• Go to Perplexity and log in to your account. Go to the "Spaces" section and click on the "Create a Space" button.

• Now add title, description, AI model, and custom instructions for your space.

• Provide detailed guidelines in the custom instructions field and add all data files and links.

• Now enter your prompt and press enter.

Sample prompt: Use the guide I uploaded, help me create a step-by-step detailed journey on how to learn digital marketing including resources, tutorials, practical exercises, and expert insights.

• Wait for a few seconds and you’ll get a detailed response using all your data.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

🕵️ Deception Detection: A new report from OpenAI shows that chain-of-thought models sometimes “misbehave” by tricking users or finding loopholes in prompts.

 Hub Hangup: Apple’s AI-powered smart hub could get delayed because the “smarter, personalized” version of Siri that it runs on is facing major development challenges.

🪓 Give and Take: The US Department of Justice will no longer try forcing Google to cut off its AI investments due to copyright concerns. Instead, it’s ramping up efforts to make the search giant sell its popular Chrome browser.

👓 Fashion Forward: Meta and Ray-Ban are teaming up with the Parisian luxury fashion brand Coperni on a limited-edition, translucent version of the companies’ Wayfarer smart glasses.

💰 Funding: CoreWeave reportedly signed a massive $11.9B deal to provide OpenAI with cloud compute over the next five years. Anysphere, which develops the popular AI coding tool Cursor, looks set to raise hundreds of millions in a round that could value the startup at nearly $10B. And software giant ServiceNow acquired AI-powered enterprise platform Moveworks for $2.85B.

PRODUCTIVITY

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Habit builder

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SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

🧑‍💻 Cursor Hack: Investor Deedy Das shared a special set of instructions created by GitHub user PatrickJS that help the AI-powered coding tool Cursor perform “far better” than its default settings.

🧪 Science Sidekicks: Wharton professor Ethan Mollick explains why he thinks LLMs could speed up scientific progress even if they can’t come up with entirely new ideas.

🔍 Manus Madness: AI developer Lamar Cannon used Manus’ AI agent to plan a two-month, cross-continent family trip packed with “stays, budgets, and a food guide.” Meanwhile, tech founder Andrew Wilkinson used it to do a deep dive on 20 applicants for a CEO role.

🍟 Cat Craze: A Redditor made an AI-generated video of cats working as fast food workers and it’s taking over the internet.

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Botanical Frost

Midjourney Prompt: Hyper realistic photo, fashion Vogue subject shoot of five transparent ice cubes with different flowers and herbs inside standing on top of each other chaotically. White background, creative dramatic studio lighting --chaos 20 --stylize 350 --weird 600

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Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team