Chinese AI Agent Manus Aims to Transcend Chatbots, Says Butterfly Effect Founder
Chinese start-up Butterfly Effect is looking to make waves in the domestic market for large language models (LLMs) with its general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) agent, Manus. The company is focusing on applications that go beyond the capabilities of chatbot technology, like ChatGPT.
Tencent Holdings-backed Butterfly Effect has garnered attention within the AI community, both at home and abroad. Last week, the company held an invitation-only online preview of Manus. According to a demonstration video hosted online at manus.im, the AI agent can perform a variety of practical tasks, including creating a custom website.
Red Xiao Hong, 33, founder and chief executive of Butterfly Effect, describes Manus’s performance as being “more like a human being” than current chatbot technology. She emphasized that Manus can interact with its environment, collect feedback, and then use this feedback as a new prompt – a step beyond simply answering questions.
In an interview with Tencent’s news portal in February, published last week, Xiao said that she did not initially focus on developing LLMs, but instead aimed to concentrate on applications – an area of the AI industry that, in her view, has yet to reach full maturity. LLMs are the core technology behind generative AI services, such as ChatGPT, she explained.
According to a Monday post on X by Peak Ji Yichao, co-founder and chief scientist at Butterfly Effect, Manus was built on top of existing LLMs, including Anthropic’s Claude and fine-tuned versions of Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
