> Manus AI is real and ahead of its American counterpart

Isn’t Manus just based on Claude plus browser-use?

I can’t get beyond the first few statement knowing that Manus is just a wrapper around “American counterparts”

I just want an AI agent that I prompt with my bank account data and the phrase "make me some money", so I can come back after a year and see that bank account doubling.

Meanwhile I'd pretty much spend the time on the beach.

"No such thing as a free lunch."

In all seriousness if such a system were to exist, why wouldn't the creator simply use it to make great returns for themself instead of scraps for everyone else?

Any significant edge in the market will swiftly be corrected. If it doesn't, the entire market collapses. We can't all sit back at the beach doing nothing while our autonomous AI agents make us all millionaires. Where is that money coming from? Who is generating it?

I don’t understand the point of Manus. I don’t need an agent that can kind of do my taxes and kind of plan a vacation and kind of analyze the stock market. If I want to do my taxes, I need a computer program that is very good at doing that and only that. And building that highly specialized computer program looks a lot like writing the software we’ve all been doing for 50 years.

I have not looked at Manus but I could imagine that it uses the highly Specialized program for you and fills in the forms based on data it found.

Sure sure sure... or it hallucinates that it sent your tax forms when it didn't. Or it makes an OOPSIE DAISY with some numbers that you overlook. Or or or...

You might not be the target audience or you might not understand the tech yet. These agents are for replacing things like Mechanical Turk and data entry jobs at first.

A couple of years ago, every company added a shitty chat bot to their website. Imagine that without adding a ton of complicated integrations and writing a ton of rules, you can make this chat bot actually become somewhat useful. That would take a ton of work away from customer contact centers.

Imagine that software testing can be as simple as writing: "Create 50 concurrent users that are signing up to my Android app." In stead of writing a shit ton of tests in Robot Framework that need to be updated for every change of the code.

There's some real benefit in AI Agents, even in the short term... But it might not be for end users.

But people are wary of it, they know about the enshitification to come, and it will be horrible beyond comprehension. Those products of the past, have burned right through all layers of trust - and there just is none left, to invest into that dystopian vision of a future where a robot butler wakes you in the morning with advertisement jingles and disregards your shopping list to buy the sponsoring brands.

And all those cooperation, that are supposed to buy AI labor- they know that those mafia companies trying to get in via subscription, will be the worst union of all. Software eating the worlds bread butter indeed.Subscription is up, and its now (costOfEarnings -1$)

People can see the takeover and the faces of it for what they really are and boy is it ugly.

Zvi posted a response[0] to this post, with the following comment:

  Ignore the first sentence in Tyler Cowen’s post here, where he asserts that Manus is ‘for real, and ahead of its American counterparts.’ That’s a rather silly way of summarizing the situation, given everything we now know.

[0]: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-manus-marketing-madness

I saw their posts several times, and thought they were some really shitty spams.