Hacker News Reader

Comment by chenzhekl | Hacker News Reader

This acquisition is a complete joke in China. From the very beginning, the company focused almost entirely on marketing. Then, after a few months, it fled China and relocated to Singapore. Now that it’s been acquired by Meta, you could say it has finally fulfilled its mission.

View on HN

Mata acquired a great marketing team. Their marketing skills and hyping skills are far superior to their technical skils

but then again in this day and age maybe marketing skills are more important than anything else...

I have never heard about Manus before that post about them reaching 100M ARR or something. Where did they advertise?

AI influencers on YouTube were going wild with demos for about 2 weeks around the middle of this year. It was enough to get me to sign up to the manus wait list but by the time they told me I was in I’d realised how superficial the recommendations from the YouTube crowd were. Also I’d seen a few waves of hype like that and realised how bogus the content was.

They're promoting it on Chinese social media. Although those media outlets are some AI-related self-publishers

It’s because the Meta brand is poison.

How does due diligence work for these type of acquisitions, do they even have one? What do they think they’re buying? A team? Technology? A brand?

Due diligence is a joke in the first place, nobody actually does anything these days beyond flip through some Powerpoints. They think their hockey stick graphs are some diligence but in reality every graph is engineered to be a hockey stick.

The vast majority of whether a deal is good or bad has nothing to do with anything you could be duly diligent about. It has everything do with whether the founders are clever executors to capture market, and the luck of the company in the coming years, the latter you cannot predict.

I am Chinese and AI founder since 2023

This statement is completely baseless

1. Manus was never targeting Chinese domestic market, for obvious reasons

2. Manus was founded by successful founder with exit, backed toptier investors in China, they always have great reputation in the AI industry

3. Prior to manus' launch, the team developed Monica, as they are the frontier AI chat bot aggregator

I really felt disgusted by stereotyping Chinese startup: they either baselessly downplay the innovation by the team, or they attribute their success to morally inferior conduct, which both are never really different than their western counterparts.

Please stop stereotyping Chinese startup

I am also Chinese and AI founder.

> they always have great reputation in the AI industry

Highly doubt this.

> the team developed Monica, as they are the frontier AI chat bot aggregator

How is this remotely technically impressive? LLM chat apps have been commoditized for years already.

Even within the Chinese tech/AI community, Manus has often been frowned upon. People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing went viral to demonstrate the point. Most of the positive coverage around Manus came from WeChat PR articles, which I'm sure you know how those Gongzhonghao work.

I agree that the West often stereotypes Chinese startups in unfair ways. But the Manus story is about as stereotypical as it gets.

I am also Chinese and AI user. Manus is excellent, and it's hard to find a rival when it comes to making PPTs. The effect of wild search is exaggerated. The hype from official accounts is one thing, and the overwhelming scam comments on social media are another; neither is accurate. It has been almost a year. If Manus were really as simple as just getting Open Manus up and running, we should have seen many similar products. But unfortunately, there's only one Manus.

> People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing went viral to demonstrate the point.

I tried openmanus and I frowned at openmanus team's intentionally attention grabbing gimmick after manus' overnight success, and open manus does not work at the moment.

> People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing

This is not a good sign but may not be as terrible as it used to be: it seems like as soon as one idea makes money someone else is able to reproduce it fast. The barrier for defensibility is so much higher than before.

Please. Manus had a live demo in Google Expo 2025 in Singapore and they blew it. It was such bad taste.

Manus had 1 marketing gimmick with the agents. That is no longer anything novel.

A failed demo discounted a entire 100mm arr?

they are 8 months old. there is no proof of 100m arr.

It has nothing to do with being Chinese. The fact that the founder with previous connections is exactly what people are suggesting is a problem.

I think China will beat the US in AI but absolutely not using this silicon valley style bullshit model of valuation. Companies like the one that produced Deepseek using cutting edge academic research to do more with vastly less are hat will win. New algorithms will beat money. And the US has abandoned science, and thus it will lose.

If it has nothing to do with being Chinese founded, then why it stated obviously baseless statements without objections until myself pointed out the facts. I mean, manus is top tier by any measure in the startup scene, and someone just say that it's a joke, then sane people's immediate reaction should be asking why, right?

Why suddenly it becomes automatically accepted, other than being a Chinese founded startup, tell me, what else can prompts such mental inconsistency?

Manus attempted to ride the wave of DeepSeek and hired an army of influencers inside and outside of China, especially inside, to hype it up as the second coming of DeepSeek, even though they didn’t target the Chinese domestic market (as you correctly pointed out). IIRC it quickly became a joke in about two weeks after it became obvious that they were a thin layer on top of Claude and all marketing. I don’t know how they maneuvered into the current acquisition (feasting on Zuck’s fomo?), but saying “they always have great reputation in the AI industry” is laughable. This kind of garbage damages your reputation by loose association, you should be mad at them, not commenters.

Edit: Actually, the announcement doesn’t say anything about valuation, so it’s not even clear it’s a successful exit.

I don't get it

Riding a wave of industry is literally the foundation of startups paradiam itself. Why it suddenly became a sin for a Chinese founded startup?

This is exactly the disgusting bias (even to the point of racism) I mostly pointed out.

It's like everyone automatically applied double standards to Chinese founded startup and not even admit that under such influence.

Riding a wave is fine. Stealing someone else’s clout and falsely advertising your product is not. This applies to every other shitty AI company with little to offer on top of someone else’s foundational model, regardless of origin country. It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.

Are they the only grifters? No, not by a long shot. Are they the only ones ridiculed? No.

> It’s just that Manus is particularly egregious in their false advertising, and their bullshit is an insult to people doing actual heavy lifting, like DeepSeek or Alibaba Qwen team.

I still felt this baseless.

Manus at the time is break through result. Are they egregious in advertising they being deepseek moment? I don't know think so. Is it a marketing ploy? Yes, but it's far less egregious than any normal AI startup, like cluely.

Comparing to deepseek or qwen, heavy lifting what? Manus is built on Claude at the time it's doing egregious marketing, how can it be considered heavy lifted by unrelated products. What's the point you want to make?

It was never a breakthrough of any kind, especially not the "half of all office work are now obsolete" kind they tried to claim.

> Comparing to deepseek or qwen, heavy lifting what?

DeepSeek and Qwen were/are building reputation. Manus was stealing and tanking it. That's what it was.

> they attribute their success to morally inferior conduct

I’m not seeing accusations of morally inferior conduct here. Tech people like to dunk on marketing people no matter where in the world they are.

From wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_(AI_agent)

...

Company background

Butterfly Effect Technology was founded by entrepreneur Xiao Hong (Chinese: 肖弘), who previously established Nightingale Technology in 2015.[2] Nightingale developed productivity tools including "Yiban Assistant" (Chinese: 壹伴助手) and "Weiban Assistant" (Chinese: 微伴助手), AI-driven platforms serving over 2 million business users. These products attracted investment from Tencent and ZhenFund.[5]

In 2022, recognizing the potential of large language models, Xiao Hong founded Butterfly Effect and released Monica, an AI assistant browser extension integrating models including ChatGPT and Claude.[5] By 2024, Monica accumulated over 10 million users while maintaining profitability, serving as both a technological foundation and user acquisition platform for Manus.[5]

---

Doesn't sound like a "company focused almost entirely on marketing".

Definitely feels like a Claude wrapped with a lot of marketing. But you’d think there must be something more if Meta acquired them…

Ok, I guess we’re in a bubble.

They have browser automation, and a bunch of other agent tools to manage tasks, do things like PowerPoint slides, etc. I find chatgpt agent mode better for most tasks though.

I mean given they went on a crazy AI hiring spree and then desmantling the whole thing just a few weeks later... I'll actually need prove that there is anything in there.

Manus is pretty "big" in the entrepreneur crowd here in Brazil

When it came out is was very good, and had much better results than ChatGPT

I never heard of manus so I clicked the About Us page. Wow, it is insufferable.

I had to look. This tickled the copywriter in me: "Mission: To extend human reach by giving everyone the code to leverage their life." so you can leverage your life? never thought of that.

I guess if you live a highly leveraged life, you have better chances of success, but if you die, five other people die too. Not sure it's a good idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com