Manus, the new artificial intelligence tool from China, is disrupting the global tech race with a new AI agent that some analysts believe is far more powerful than the competition.
Manus AI cofounder Yichao “Peak” Ji said in a video preview of his team’s new tool that it is the “first general AI agent.”
He said Manus gives a window into artificial general intelligence, AGI, the term tech researchers use to describe a theoretical artificially intelligent system that can outperform human capabilities.
“This isn’t just another chatbot or workflow, it’s a truly autonomous agent that bridges the gap between conception and execution,” he said in the video. “Where other AI stops at generating ideas, Manus delivers results. We see it as the next paradigm of human-machine collaboration and potentially a glimpse into AGI.”
As interest has swelled since Manus shared its work last week, the company said its servers are overwhelmed and it is working to expand its computational resources.
The global interest has extended to the West. Former National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence contributor Craig Smith said the tiny team from Shenzhen seems to be assembling a “new category of intelligence.”
Mr. Smith wrote in Forbes that he knows Silicon Valley is panicking.
“The fear is that Manus represents the industrialization of intelligence — a system so efficient that companies will soon find themselves forced to replace human labor with AI not out of preference, but necessity,” Mr. Smith wrote.
Mr. Smith said Manus is evidence China is leading the world toward autonomous AI agents, which can code software, complete clerical tasks, and make decisions like humans without ever getting tired.
Other AI teams are hard at work building authentic AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in January that he believed AI agents would “join the workforce” in 2025 and his team was confident it knew how to make AGI.
American firm Scale AI is working with the Pentagon on a new program for military operations that brings the company’s “agentic applications” together with Anduril’s software and Microsoft’s large language models.
Some tech leaders are concerned about the rush to develop and deploy AI agents. Meredith Whittaker, president of encrypted communication platform Signal, is warning that AI agents endanger people’s privacy and security.
Ms. Whittaker said at the SXSW conference last week that her team is closely tracking the development of AI agents on devices because of how much control people are turning over to various systems.
“There’s a profound issue with security and privacy that is haunting this sort of hype around agents and it is ultimately threatening to break the blood-brain barrier between the application layer and the [operating system] layer by conjoining all of these separate services, muddying their data, and doing things like undermining the privacy of your Signal messages,” she said at SXSW.
