Chinese AI agent Manus transcends chatbots, founder of start-up Butterfly Effect says

Chinese start-up Butterfly Effect, creator of general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) agent Manus, appears poised to shake up the red-hot domestic market for large language models (LLMs), as it focuses on applications beyond ChatGPT-like chatbots.

Tencent Holdings-backed Butterfly Effect has caught the AI community’s attention at home and abroad, following its invitation-only online preview last week for Manus, which can execute various practical tasks such as creating a custom website, according to a demonstration video online at manus.im.

Touting its edge over chatbots in terms of performance, Manus also claims it can quickly devise an itinerary for a trip to Japan, provide an in-depth analysis of Tesla’s stock and offer real-estate tips in New York based on a family’s requirements.

Butterfly effect founder and chief executive Red Xiao Hong, 33, said an AI agent is “more like a human being”, compared with how chatbots perform, because it does not only think and answer questions, but interacts with its environment, collects feedback and uses the feedback as a new prompt.

In an interview with Tencent’s news portal in February that was published last week, Xiao said he had not considered developing LLMs “from day one” because he wanted to focus on applications, which is a segment of the AI industry that has still not matured. LLMs are the technology underpinning generative AI services like ChatGPT.

Manus is built on existing LLMs, including Anthropic’s Claude and fine-tuned versions of Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen, Butterfly Effect co-founder and chief scientist Peak Ji Yichao said on X on Monday. Alibaba owns the Post.