Some early users were enthusiastic about the product’s capabilities; others complained it took too long and crashed.

Manus, an “agentic” artificial intelligence platform, launched in preview last week, capturing significant attention in the tech community. Developed by Monica, a Chinese startup, Manus promises to revolutionize human-machine collaboration.

After running the Manus prompts on ChatGPT, I can see why the new AI assistant has drawn more comparison to DeepSeek. It does seem to execute prompts in impressive ways. If you're a researcher, a designer, or someone who needs deeply researched lesson plans and multimedia integration, Manus makes sense, if you can get an invite.