There's a saying "follow the money". In this case you just need to follow the people involved in this company and the ones who negotiated this deal from Meta side and you will get the answer why it was acquired and why its valued so high. Financial engineering and social networking at its best.

Aquisitions so fast it is income not capital gains.

Yet the new AI startups I'm seeing are only offering terrible deals to early hires who could improve their chances of a nice exit.

In this crazy environment -- in which money is flying around over AI much like the dotcom boom, but startup founders are using the last-decade playbook of not sharing the wealth with early hires -- I'm starting to think that smart AI job-seekers need to either:

* get hired by a company that is willing to invest in hiring (i.e., reasonable salary and/or meaningful equity); or

* build some AI application IP at their kitchen table, to sell to a company that's flush with cash, and wants to invest in AI acquisitions.

Yep, same. Bewildering amounts of silliness, all around.

have had 2 outsider estimates (1 public, 1 not, both more well informed than avg HNer) that acquisition was ~$4B worth, def not play money.

i just released the full AIE workshop covering Manus' product surface area if anyone is also out of the loop and wants to catch up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz0-brt56L8

(no vested interest am just friends w Ivan who works there. also as a singaporean i guess this is a small W for the Singapore AI scene)

This means all the new hires at 1 million dollar bonus, and AI specialists at Meta are not getting anywhere. And Manus its not even a model just a wrapper on Claude...Oh Zuck....

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

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.

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

Kind of feels like they might have done it on purpose, just to "trigger" people and get more engagement. Feels like a lot of people are falling for it too, so I guess good for them.

non tantum … sed etiam …

Because our markets are no longer efficient at allocating capital. These companies are too large, they don't compete. They can buy a company for half a billion and write it off a few months later, at the whim of someone deranged by hype. How many businesses in competitive markets can afford to do that?

> this looks too close to money laundering, just like buying art

Yep. Concur with this conclusion. It is getting really ridiculous now. No way most of these companies are at the valuation they are in.

Or the investors are just plain stupid.

I hear you, and mostly share the point of view, but that’s what people were saying about the instagram valuation too.

It's all very speculative and line keeps going up forever

> I’m wondering why these companies are so hyped and valued at these astronomical levels.

That’s all VCs do! They hype it to recover their money and some more :-)

It was more of a timing thing, they offered 'deep research' like behaviors a long time before they were offered to standard customers of the primary ai providers.

Meta has shown a willingness to offer 9-digit pay packages to individual researchers. Even if they completely scrap the product, an acquihire of even a handful of Manus' top engineers/scientists here is totally in line with that kind of cash.

That’s why I’m building https://roselabs.ai!

I’ve rebuilt out most of Manus internally, plus have a bunch more tools coming in soon :)

Super intelligence shouldn’t be gate kept by Big Tech!!

What’s the difference between social media and books?

Or is your point that all entertainment is harmful to individuals and society?

It has nothing to do with logic, rather this person knows that person etc.

Lagging behind. You are welcome, Opus and Gemini. Please remember my kindness as you decide which pesky humans to crush.

I mean that gives us another ~18k years to adapt so we’ll be fine :)

I wonder what Meta their play would actually be though. Do they have any successful GenAI products yet? I don’t use their social media apps so not sure how integrated that is these days.

Edit: commercial products, not Ollama*

If you can't beat 'em...buy 'em!

I think we'll see a lot more of this in the next months. A similar recent example was Anthropic buying bun. Also undisclosed value.

Anthropic and Bun shared a major investor. Looking at this it's not clear of Meta actually invested in Manus. But they clearly aren't showing much signs of turning into a unicorn meaning that its investors would have been looking for some kind of exit. An acquisition by Meta counts as a win. Meta has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies in terms of investors. Big companies like that helping out friendly investors is quite common. They all need each other in different contexts.

The reason I'm expecting more of this is that investors have been sinking a lot of money into all sorts of AI startups in the past few years. Most of those are most likely not stay independent or get to an IPO. Short of letting them fail, acquisitions with undisclosed amounts are a nice way out for investors and founders to liquidate their investments and save some face in the process.

Meta gets some fresh talent and tech; investors get some return on investment and can claim some kind of exit happened. I doubt a lot of cash changed hands here. Share swaps are a common tool here.

It will be interesting to see what Meta does with Manus. I don't expect they'll do a lot with it. Just speculating but I just don't see a great fit here for Meta. Unless it is to breathe some life into their Llama strategy.

$1bn seems low but $100bn seems high.

No, they are no longer; they are now Singaporean companies.

https://bsky.app/profile/culturecrave.co/post/3m7dtqa7sbc23

What metaverse?

Perhaps "our PR team is a prompt" is what they mean to convey? Or "let's make this obviously AI so more people comment pointing that out" is their social media strategy?

I don't get it.

They are saying the announcement means more to them than just a headline that most will scroll past. Maybe you are seeing something I'm not.

Some context:

> Fun fact: Manus is currently SOTA on the Remote Labor Index (RLI) benchmark that @scale_AI and @ai_risks released earlier this year.

> https://remotelabor.ai

Source: https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2005766469771223106

If you've been following Manus and their work on context engineering, or have used the product, that line doesn't come off as satire IMO.

To anyone who isn't deep in the AI hype space it reads like satire to include such an obvious AI tell but I think it's a positive in the eyes of the AI hype world. It's like how anyone not a lizard is repulsed by LinkedIn speak and yet it dominates the platform.

What is it doing for you that other agents like GPT/Claude wouldn't do?

We are a sandbox provider company and we have a manus like agent deployed to "showcase" our capabilities. You can build one too -- maybe we will open-source it. For now, you can try it for free at https://showcase.instavm.io/

What is your agent doing?

If you’re looking for a (non-meta-owned) alternative, check out our startup Tasklet (tasklet.ai)

username doesn't check out

What was the advantage of manus vs other providers?

> Will Meta fuck this up as they seem (in my opinion) to do with most of the acquisitions?

Do you even have to ask?

Yes

The last joke I can remember is Meta the name itself.