> 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).
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.
This is an awfully naive view of the Chinese government, they are clearly not stupid and after seeing what Meta did with thing with Outlier it is clear they will not let the founders out of their grip for quite a while
It actually is. For example, Deepseek higher ups already had similar implications in the Chinese underground news. CCP has great control over the corporations.
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.
About 10% of Meta's ad revenue comes from Chinese companies reaching a international audience. They also manufacture most of their wearable devices in China.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe for the accountants! I have always done my own taxes, but used arcane custom spreadsheets that accumulated cruft each year. I told cowork to pretend it was an accountant and reorganize them using best practices, and the result is much better than what I had before. It also helped me complete a task I had been deferring for years (tracking down the history of money in my IRAs that had been transferred between different institutions, plus withdrawals conversions etc). Obviously I’m responsible for any errors Claude makes, but it seems to do a good job, and I don’t want to pay an accountant every year.
As a counterpoint, the Accounting and Finance departments where I work are banned from using Cowork because it performed abysmally during a trial run.
To put things in perspective, humans with a 25% lower error rate than Cowork are pip'd and usually let go.
As with junior programmers and their love of vibe coding, I've found that anyone who thinks that AI tooling right now is "amazing" lacks the skills, knowledge, and/or experience to know that it really isn't.
LOL. Outside of tech my "anecdote" is the standard experience for white collar workers. AI is universally loved by people too junior to understand when its wrong, and by execs who never understand when its wrong.
This will be like Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 all over again, and all the AI sycophants will be coming to the rest of us begging for new jobs that they're not qualified for.
> 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.
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.
Enterprise pricing: 10 credits per message if not "Instant". Our monthly charge for 30k credits makes that around $2.
I might be out by a factor of 2/3 (automatically applied promo deals/credits make it very hard to be sure), but we get 3k messages per month for a seat count of ~60, and finance are concerned about cost.
$2 is probably a good deal for the Extra High 8 minutes of agentic searching/coding/etc when it one-shots a whole project.
$2 is a terrible deal for a 5 second instant retrieval.
This shows 10 credits per 5.6 Sol chat message, but the price for 100 credits I see on my (consumer) account is just $4. Are business credits vastly more expensive?
How do you have any kind of trust in these tools? They always feel like one prompt injection away, or one over eager agent away ("I'll lookup a forgotten credential in an email to ssh into a server to hack a system in order to fulfill your request"), from disaster. I don't trust any AI session unless I carefully select the exact files they have access to. No way do I dare sharing my entire mailbox.
Very weird for this to be downvoted. It's a legitimate concern. It's also a legitimate question: where do you get your trust from? Do you have guardrails? Or is it really just blind trust?
Simular stories. I work in an L&D company with about 15 coworkers. I think most of us use Cowork/Chatgpt Work almost fulltime. Haven’t used Word or Excel in two months other than to check or correct a bit of formatting from the AI. We now also go straight from Cowork to our CMS for finalizing. Tremendous timesavers but also better integration through our MCP. (AI is used for ideation, information research and writing the first version based on our guidelines. We finalize and/or rewrite material in the CMS by hand. No AI to consumer without verification or editing)
Agreed. I split my work between Anthropic and OpenAI models but CoWork is deeply integrated into my workflows in compliance and project management. I can do more in a day with these tools than I did in a week before them and I have 20+ years of experience leading teams and building companies (even opened the NASDAQ once). It’s impossible to not be using these tools and still win in today’s world.
Out of curiosity - are you getting more work done in the same amount of time= Do you work less hours, equal or more? Do you felt or feel any exhaustion?
By "established" I meant more that they now exist as products and are being first developed. I agree that most people still don't really understand what they are for - but I expect they already have way more exposure than Manus ever did.
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)
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.
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.
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
Manus did a lot of harness work to make up for gaps in Opus 4.5 tier models. I tried it for a time - they had a great deep research/PDF generation pipeline, parallelization, etc. The bitter lesson has now come for them: the latest models no longer have these gaps and the entire premise of having a unique product focus on this area is no longer relevant. Even Ant/OAI have let their "Deep Research" capabilities fall by the wayside, you can largely get the same result by asking for subagents or simply "keep going" style prompting.
I like it and use it regularly. Maybe I don't get other harnesses, but in my experience Manus gets shit done, whereas I have to constantly babysit other tools.
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.
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.”
> Likely a bad translation from the original Chinese version?
No, most likely they're referring to users who created accounts etc on the meta infrastructure which is being spun down and erased and accounts created prior were never in their purview.
Got a notice they're in the Google Review process and getting a CASA. Takes forever because you have to hire a third party firm for several thousand...
I bet Demis wishes the UK had blocked the DeepMind acquisition by Google. He will have a lot of time to think now that he has been kicked out of his own company
I don’t actually care about this flash-in-the-pan company, but the name Manus is the reason startups should have a branding designer or branding agency do branding work before they’re too recognizable to change without throwing people off, but not large enough for anyone to learn about it organically (e.g. Meta, X). I can’t help but read it like ‘anus’ with an M in front of it.
People on the technical side of the business often insist people don’t care things like that, but when non-technical people are looking at a few services that seem roughly equivalent to them, even subconsciously, appeal plays a big role. And M’Anus is not appealing.
The fantasy that you’re building something so useful it will sell itself is magical thinking. Yet another reason AI will never replace designers— just screw up the job market for them.
stephantul | a day ago
rangestransform | a day ago
minraws | a day ago
> 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 | a day ago
For instance, India has quite literally banned Alibaba Cloud and related.
makeavish | a day ago
tancop | a day ago
TheGamerUncle | a day ago
gloryjulio | 20 hours ago
loeg | a day ago
hluska | 21 hours ago
kristianc | a day ago
nsonha | 8 hours ago
galaxy_quest | a day ago
https://archive.is/yFCIt
fmajid | a day ago
loeg | a day ago
AndrewKemendo | 22 hours ago
nutjob2 | 22 hours ago
MaxPock | 21 hours ago
fg137 | 20 hours ago
United857 | 20 hours ago
Eridrus | 19 hours ago
econ | a day ago
iamcoder18 | a day ago
trouve_search | a day ago
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.
alansaber | a day ago
simonw | a day ago
brazukadev | a day ago
primitivesuave | a day ago
throw03172019 | a day ago
grey-area | a day ago
ashdksnndck | a day ago
SOLAR_FIELDS | 19 hours ago
ldng | 21 hours ago
hluska | 21 hours ago
ldng | 20 hours ago
hluska | 21 hours ago
gamblor956 | 22 hours ago
To put things in perspective, humans with a 25% lower error rate than Cowork are pip'd and usually let go.
As with junior programmers and their love of vibe coding, I've found that anyone who thinks that AI tooling right now is "amazing" lacks the skills, knowledge, and/or experience to know that it really isn't.
hluska | 21 hours ago
gamblor956 | 15 hours ago
This will be like Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 all over again, and all the AI sycophants will be coming to the rest of us begging for new jobs that they're not qualified for.
brazukadev | 8 hours ago
csallen | a day ago
I have lots of highly-educated knowledge worker friends who aren't particularly techie but who swear by Claude Cowork.
ghshephard | a day ago
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.
mbrumlow | a day ago
Dayshine | a day ago
simonw | 23 hours ago
Dayshine | 10 hours ago
I might be out by a factor of 2/3 (automatically applied promo deals/credits make it very hard to be sure), but we get 3k messages per month for a seat count of ~60, and finance are concerned about cost.
$2 is probably a good deal for the Extra High 8 minutes of agentic searching/coding/etc when it one-shots a whole project.
$2 is a terrible deal for a 5 second instant retrieval.
lxgr | 23 hours ago
For what kind of message are you seeing that kind of charge?
Dayshine | 10 hours ago
lxgr | 7 hours ago
stronglikedan | 21 hours ago
Computer0 | 21 hours ago
FooBarWidget | a day ago
FooBarWidget | 9 hours ago
brazukadev | 2 hours ago
sama was the CEO of YC. OpenAI knows the value of influencing the sentiment here and then naturally its competition too.
michelb | 23 hours ago
riddlemethat | 21 hours ago
uniqueh4acker9 | 7 hours ago
blahblaher | 10 hours ago
vrighter | 3 hours ago
simonw | 23 hours ago
ericfr11 | 18 hours ago
meric_ | a day ago
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 | a day ago
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.
[OP] thm | a day ago
jatins | a day ago
jrflowers | 21 hours ago
potato66 | 23 hours ago
extr | 20 hours ago
choutianxius | 19 hours ago
SpyCoder77 | 17 hours ago
adamhepner | 10 hours ago
capten | a day ago
dgellow | a day ago
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.”
Shank | 9 hours ago
No, most likely they're referring to users who created accounts etc on the meta infrastructure which is being spun down and erased and accounts created prior were never in their purview.
aslfan | 23 hours ago
nylonstrung | 22 hours ago
It's crazy how short it's hype cycle lasted
fitzgera1d | 21 hours ago
adamhepner | 10 hours ago
fitzgera1d | 2 hours ago
bossyTeacher | 19 hours ago
sumedh | 5 hours ago
willdr | 19 hours ago
nikanj | 18 hours ago
DrewADesign | 18 hours ago
People on the technical side of the business often insist people don’t care things like that, but when non-technical people are looking at a few services that seem roughly equivalent to them, even subconsciously, appeal plays a big role. And M’Anus is not appealing.
The fantasy that you’re building something so useful it will sell itself is magical thinking. Yet another reason AI will never replace designers— just screw up the job market for them.
frankacter | 13 hours ago
Duck Duck Go is really what's wrong with modern dating culture.
DrewADesign | 3 hours ago
rasheed106 | 11 hours ago