Manus will return to operating as an independent company

tthm about 4 hours ago 34 commentsRead Article on manus.im

RU version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

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Discussion Sentiment

67% Positive

Analyzed from 856 words in the discussion.

Discussion (34 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

trouve_search•about 2 hours ago

Does anyone here use Manus actively?

I found it worse than alternatives in the similar space (Claude, genspark, kagi research, etc.) and slightly baffling they were being acquired at a $2B valuation in the first place.

potato66•2 minutes ago

I use it alot. It's great for like researching deep on a topic. I also accidentally found that it's better at taking my directions and transferring that well to image generation especially with iteration. When I try my own iterations directly it never really lands

simonw•about 2 hours ago

ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork (and OpenClaw) are established now - they weren't at all in December 2025 when Meta tried to buy Manus.

brazukadev•about 1 hour ago

In what bubble ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork are established? I don't know anyone using it regularly and I'm in a bubble of people using lots of AI tools.

ghshephard•28 minutes ago

Claude CoWork absolutely dominates - I use it continuously now when connecting to mail, calendar, jira, google docs - any type of knowledge work. Almost everyone I know (at work) who does "Knowledge work" type stuff (as opposed to coding) uses it as their primary pane-of-glass now.

I have 15+ years of top 1 percentile knowledge using awk to process complex unstructured documents - and I don't even bother anymore - just dump the dataset into CoWork and ask it to do the analysis, cross check its work.

I did it last night during a call for a reasonably complex 10,000 node cluster with all sorts of jobs/allocations/memory constraints. I didn't even attempt to throw together a quick awk script (which would have taken me 7-8 minutes - it was a beast) - just did a nomad-job-inspect of a couple hundred jobs, and dumped all the data at CoWork (real time, while talking on the zoom) and said, "Get me the Memory/CPU requirements based on job/datacenter/SKU constraints and give me a summary Table".

Any normal person would have take 3-4 hours, minimum - futzing with google sheets and such (lots of task/taskgroup independent counts). Even I would have taken a minimum of 10 minutes. Cowork had it for me in under 30 seconds - I didn't even have to really look away from the zoom.

I haven't use the Atlassian Jira interface to manage my sprints/issues in 6+ weeks. All that cognitive drain is gone - I just ask CoWork to update the sprints, link issues to change-notices, comment and change status, set epics, etc... Zero need to find the damn field in Jira.

CoWork is legit.

csallen•44 minutes ago

> In what bubble ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork are established? I don't know anyone using it regularly and I'm in a bubble of people using lots of AI tools.

I have lots of highly-educated knowledge worker friends who aren't particularly techie but who swear by Claude Cowork.

primitivesuave•about 1 hour ago

My non-technical teammates use Claude Cowork extensively. We set up MCP servers to give them audited access to certain internal services, while they just have to think of MCP as a "connector" which they can configure in the GUI.

throw03172019•about 1 hour ago

My accountant friend says it’s amazing (he does check the work but says it’s amazingly accurate).

jatins•25 minutes ago

I found there Deep Research quite good in terms of browsing the web, better than Gemini's. Though it blew through ~40$ in one task so it was very expensive, probably running at insane margins.

meric_•about 1 hour ago

IMO I disagree. I find the built in harness (database, browser use, etc.) quite good.

The only downside (and a big one) is that by not being natively offered by OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. you're paying @ API billing and not plan billing, which makes it less appealing. (Of course Manus has a wrapper around this w some token system, but it ends up being expensive)

trouve_search•about 1 hour ago

Interesting, what does your tasks & workflow look like with them?

I generally found the quality decent (say, similar to other competitors), but the speed of task completion was very slow. I think because they would depend too much on Sonnet as a core backend, and relied on big/expensive models more than other harnesses.

alansaber•about 2 hours ago

Valuations are significantly leveraged compared to actual user metrics. My impression of Manus was that, like Perplexity, some users were using it to get around firewalls/regulation.

thm•about 1 hour ago

Too expensive & unpredictable credit system.

econ•about 2 hours ago

Perhaps unfairly my interest suddenly dropped to zero when the acquisition was announced. The hype also seemed gone?

iamcoder18•about 2 hours ago

Absolutely. Haven't heard anyone talk about recently.

capten•31 minutes ago

I expect this decupling will affect certain users. Can certain users speak up about this? I'm certain that certain users use Manus and are users on this certain site.

dgellow•19 minutes ago

Likely a bad translation from the original Chinese version?

That being said it’s the first time I see Manus, they seem to have the perfect AI startup tagline for a new season of HBO’s Silicon Valley:

“Our Mission - To extend human reach by giving everyone the code to leverage their life. Our Product - We build general AI agents as the Action Engine for life.”

stephantul•about 2 hours ago

Anyone have info on whose regulatory restrictions they are referring to?

kristianc•about 2 hours ago

Almost certainly Chinese national-security and technology-transfer restrictions around strategic AI tech. China’s NDRC formally prohibited the acquisition and ordered the transaction unwound.

galaxy_quest•about 2 hours ago

The Chinese government blocked Meta’s acquisition.

https://archive.is/yFCIt

fmajid•about 1 hour ago

The Chinese government may not be a bastion of the rule of law, but they at least seem to still have a functioning antitrust enforcement.

loeg•25 minutes ago

This had nothing to do with antitrust.

rangestransform•about 2 hours ago

China prevented the founders from leaving the country

minraws•about 2 hours ago

I think they were talking about the part,

> As part of our transition back to independent operations and to comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions, data generated by certain users on/after December 29, 2025, will be deleted from 8:00 a.m. on August 23 through August 24, 2026 (SGT). Affected users will be able to back up their data from now until 7:59 a.m. on August 23, 2026 (SGT) and restore it starting from 8:00 a.m. on August 25, 2026 (SGT).

minraws•about 2 hours ago

I would guess EU? Technically a bunch of countries don't allow data to be with Manus aka Chinese cloud services.

For instance, India has quite literally banned Alibaba Cloud and related.

makeavish•about 2 hours ago

No it’s Chinese state who is preventing founders from leaving China https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/06/12/meta-reportedly-begins-d...

tancop•about 1 hour ago

just to be clear, they did this to make sure they follow the governments order instead of running away to Singapore and going on with the acquisition. they will most likely get released when the unwinding process is complete. its not a general national security thing where AI founders cant leave the country.

loeg•26 minutes ago

Why guess? This is trivially Googleable information.