The existence of Manus makes this cautious approach harder to sustain, however. As the previously wide gap between big AI labs and upstarts narrows, the giants no longer have the luxury of taking their time. And that also means their approach to safety is no longer workable.

The new general AI agent from China had some system crashes and server overload—but it’s highly intuitive and shows real promise for the future of AI helpers.

Unlike ChatGPT, Claude, and other single-model systems, Manus claims to be the "world's first general AI agent" by using multiple AI models working in tandem — such as Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen, and various independent agents to tackle a wide range of tasks.