China Drops Another AI Bombshell: Did Threat Of Being 'Replaced' Just Get More Real?

It’s time for deja vu because we are witnessing another DeepSeek moment.

Another little-known Chinese startup Monica.im has dropped an independent AI agent — if the demo video and early reviews are to go by, it may be the most useful one on the market yet.

What Are AI Agents?

AI agents are built on top of LLMs. Unlike say, when you are interacting with ChatGPT, interacting with an AI agent wouldn’t involve as much back and forth, because they are designed to perform a task end-to-end.

So for example, if I wanted to tweet out Dzambhala NodeX articles, I could go to ChatGPT and write out each prompt every time there is an article and have it write a tweet and post, or I could design an AI agent that studies all articles as they come and decide on their tweetworthyness and the exact content and hashtags and formats they should go out in — that’s exactly what the Nodex India AI agent on X is doing right now, for example.

AI agents are not meant to replace the LLM experience but actually to act “more human” — like an employee, a therapist or even your pet.

They are all about the full experience and that also makes the threat of them “replacing” a human at work (or in love-life?) more real.

What Is Manus AI Agent?

Manus is the AI agent developed by the Chinese startup Monica and it can perform tasks like

• reviewing resumes of all candidates that have applied for a job similar to a human recruiter and send out follow-up emails if the relevant accounts are connected

• it can generate and deploy an entire website with your data and instructions

• it can conduct in-depth research on a topic of your interest

• it can write an e-book with proper formatting or generate a course for you

These are just a few of the use-cases for the AI agent that’s just a couple of days old at this point.

How is Manus AI different from other agents?

There are already quite a few AI agents in the market including OpenAI’s Operator and Deep Research and Claude’s Computer.

It seems Manus AI is outperforming Deep Research on key benchmarks like GAIA and OpenAI has yet to roll out Operator to a wider audience amid tech glitches.

Manus AI seems to be the truly-first general AI agent that works to about to hit the market.

Is Manus AI an AI Breakthrough?

AI agents are secondary-layer products built use large-language models. In that sense, they are less about breakthroughs fundamentally in the machine learning space but more applied utility in terms of how LLMs integrate with user experience to perform tasks we actually need help with day-to-day.

Is It All Hype?

AI is a budding space and there is always hype. It took quite some time to distill the truth from hype with DeepSeek and pretty much every single AI product (every move and announcement is revolutionary and pathbreaking for Twitter bros)

Some reliable early reviewers like Hugging Face head of product Victor are impressed with the AI agent.

New Happenings

• Google has launched an “AI mode” in its Search Engine as an experimental feature to Labs users, while it expands AI overviews.
  
  It looks like an interesting development in AI-fication of Search Engines. There would be a dedicated “AI mode” tab on Google Search for the Labs users and from Google’s announcement, it seems the company intends to go for a “Deep Research” like experience here.

• DuckDuckGo Takes AI product live: Google’s privacy-oriented alternative DuckDuckGo has taken duck.ai live with ability to chat with multiple models including GPT-4o mini, Claude 3 Haiku and open-source models Llama 3.3 70B and Mistral Small 3. The company is promising the same edge: that your data remains yours when chatting through its platform.

• You can now ask Grok anything by mention @grok in replies on X. Not sure if it was in response to that, but pretty interesting that it comes soon after Perplexity launched “Ask Perplexity” to much fandom on the platform.

• OpenAI mulls a $20,000 a month AI agent: Umm, yeah. No typo here. Sam Altman says it would be able to research at the level of a “PhD student.” Y’all know you can pay an actual PhD student armed with OpenAI o3 or DeepSeek R1 and get wayyyy better bang for buck right? (Whatchu thinkin’ Sam?)

• Google co-founder Larry Page is reportedly working on an AI startup to design some kick-ass products and then just have them built at a factory (via The Information.)

• Mistral just made progress on processing very large PDFs with AI with its new API OCR.

Parting Thoughts

Fun Fact: I don’t use AI’s help in writing this newsletter about AI.

As always, feel free to check out my products TushitaAI or Dzambhala Finance.