[Music] let's talk about the hottest Topic in the AI space right now a brand new autonomous agent called Manis if you've been following the hype around AI lately you might have heard people throwing around terms like GPT moment or deep seek moment intern that never sleeps or the universal hand all those catchphrases are pointing to this new product from a Chinese startup called Monica and believe me it's been all over social media and Tech sites in the past few days so what exactly is Manis well in short it's being called the world's first truly General
AI agent there are plenty of AI assistants and chat Bots out there chat Bots that can answer questions generate text or even give you code suggestions but Manis supposedly takes things a step further by actually planning tasks executing them and delivering final results think of it as an intern who not only brainstorms ideas but also fines all the grunt work for you from writing code to browsing websites and analyzing data Menace is built by a company called Monica and their site is monica. IM but the star is this new AI agent also described as your
Universal hand if you've heard the phrase men's at Manis from Latin it means mind and hand which is basically the motto behind the product knowledge shouldn't just be stored in the ai's brain it should be actively used to get results in the the real world now how did it suddenly become so famous on March 6th 2025 Monica officially launched an early preview for Manis that caused a massive wave of people staying up all night just to snag an invitation code no joke some folks even tried reselling codes on various secondhand platforms for anywhere from 999
Yuan around 137 us to a Skyhigh 100,000 Yuan nearly $144,000 most of the codes up for resale were at least several hundred or a few thousand bucks all because the demand exploded faster than the team expected the reason for such excitement comes from the advanced capabilities that Manis demonstrates according to the official site it's got a multiple agent structure that essentially means different sub agents inside the system handle distinct parts of a task One agent might do the planning another might do the actual execution like writing a python script or visiting a specific website and
yet another one might verify the accuracy of the result this multi-agent collaboration supposedly mirrors the way a human Team Works one person can strategize another person does the coding and so forth the Synergy of these sub agents is apparently what allows Manis to accomplish super complex tasks we're talking everything from screening resumés for an open job position to analyzing real estate listings based on your income and neighborhood preferences to analyzing stock data from multiple companies building a dashboard or summarizing an entire set of financial statements in one demonstration a user needed to pick a house
in New York with a safe Community a solid school district and a price range that matched their budget Mana systematically searched online for safety data looked up property prices did budget calculations with Python scripts and finally presented a polished report complete with a recommended list of properties that's more than just a cute chatbot answer it's an entire workflow that ends with a finished product people have also tested Manis by having it plan a trip to Japan in April do thorough Tesla stock analyses create interactive course materials for a middle school teacher who wants to explain
momentum theories and even compile a list of B2B companies from YC's w25 batch Manis doesn't just spit out bullet points either it can write code generate visual dashboards and lay everything out in a table or Excel doc if that's what you prefer part of what makes this so impressive is how Manis apparently achieved new state-of-the-art performance performance on something called the Gaia Benchmark Gaia from what we know measures how well a general AI assistant can solve real world tasks according to the team Mana surpasses other systems like open ai's deep research on all three levels
of gaia's difficulty ratings the specifics of those tests aren't widely detailed but the hype is real especially with big claims like we surpass open ai's best models at the same level now Monica is a company found founded by shiao Hong who's a Serial entrepreneur and graduated from waj Jong University of Science and Technology back in 2015 there's also mention of a co-founder and chief scientist named G Chow who did a demonstration video that got hundreds of thousands of views on social platforms within about 20 hours another partner zanga popped up online saying they've had to
limit invites because their servers can't keep up interestingly the company had changes in its shareholder structure in 2024 we even see that at 1.10 cents Venture Capital arm invested in them and so did Zen Fund in July of 2022 not a lot of official corporate structure details are out there but that's standard for many startups trying to scale quickly there's also chatter about how Manis might become the next deep sea some people are comparing that big moment in January to what's happening now with Manis the local media and social Platforms in China are calling it
another Sputnik moment or another GPT moment referencing how chat GPT shook up the world regardless you can see it's made enough waves to get coverage from Outlets like Global times China Daily Malay mail Newsweek and so on everyone is connecting the dots that China has had multiple breakthroughs in AI this year from large language models to General AI agents one thing that sets Manis apart from typical generative AI is that it's aiming for what we often call artificial general intelligence it's still obviously not going to pick up your kids from school or do your laundry
in the physical physical world but in the digital space it can handle multi-step processes that you'd usually pass on to an assistant or an intern we also heard from a few references that at least 21% of Enterprises by January 2024 had already adopted AI agents in some capacity Gartner apparently predicts that number will be above 80% by 2026 which means if Manis does well it's tapping right into a super hot Market the potential of AI agents to fully automate tasks like B2B sourcing analyzing Amazon store data or preparing store sales Improvement strategies could be huge
for businesses the official Mana page even shows it can look up local data for a barbecue restaurant in Texas to help them boost sales or that it can do kagle competitions by writing code to rank in the top 10% all these use cases are showcased in the official use case Gallery so if you want to try it how do you get access right now it's Invitation Only and that's caused this crazy shortage of in invites people are literally flipping them on secondhand marketplaces for thousands of dollars according to the folks behind Manis they're working on
scaling up their servers to allow more Open Access they say it'll hopefully be free to use at some point but no official date is confirmed critics are already asking whether Manis is truly autonomous or just combining existing Tech in a slick package Monica is known for creating useful AI based Solutions especially through their popular browser plug-in for chat GPT they went from0 to 10 million users in a Flash so maybe they'll pull off another win here with an AI agent that's actually practical regardless of the skepticism Manis has definitely shaken the AI scene especially in
China seeing it unzip files sift through resumés run Python scripts and compile real estate data all by itself goes beyond typical chatbot abilities and then there's its so-called autonomous learning where it retains your preferences like table formatted results for for future tasks there's also the question of competition giants like anthropic open Ai and Google have all teased or introduced agent-like systems that can do more than just talk but we haven't seen many workable agent demos as thorough as Manis right now all eyes are on how well Manis scales and whether it really can deliver on
this agent of the future promise only time will tell if it's another deep seek moment a fleeting hype train or the next evolution in AI let me know in the comments what you think is Manis just a well- packaged aggregator of AI tools or is it truly a game Cher pointing us toward a real General AI future thanks for tuning in and I'll see you all in the next one
