Manus
Butterfly Effect · · Agent
A general-purpose agent from a Chinese startup, launched invitation-only, that plans and executes long multi-step tasks in a cloud sandbox and returns finished deliverables. It ran on other labs' models rather than its own.
Why it matters
Showed that a competitive agent product could be built on top of someone else's frontier model, and that the agent layer was a separate market from the model layer. Its viral launch is also the moment agents became a mass consumer expectation outside the US labs.
This is LLM World's historical reading, not a claim by Butterfly Effect. The facts above and the sources below are what it rests on.
Sources
Record status: partly verified · confidence 65/100
Dated by Wikipedia, which states the beta launch date plainly. The company's own launch announcement was a video and invite-code rollout rather than a dated blog post, and I found no primary page carrying the date. A contemporaneous news dateline (TechCrunch covered Manus through March 2025) would strengthen this.
- en.wikipedia.org Independent analysis archived