Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ManusAI Joins Meta

manus.im

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 221 posts

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#181

Post by lokar »

bko wrote: post #157
dinniwang wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a saying "follow the money". In this case you just need to follow the people involved in this company and the ones who negotiated this deal from Meta side and you will get the answer why it was acquired and why its valued so high. Financial engineering and social networking at its best.

Their wiki says they have ARR over 100m. Pretty impressive for a product that's 9 months old. 20x multiple is high sure, but hardly seems like friends giving friends money for ... reasons

It’s not so hard to get ARR if you don’t care about margin.

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#182

Post by nikoomilana »

azangru wrote: post #53
sokka_h2otribe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Op is saying it sounds like it was written like an LLM

I don't get it either. Since LLMs emulate human writing, what is it about that sentence that gives away that it was written by an LLM rather than human? Haven't we seen plenty of hollow-sounding self-aggrandizing marketing copies like this one pre-LLMs? What is it that is wrong with this sentence? Please don't say it's an em-dash...

Give this a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#...

I linked "Negative Parallelisms" because it's relevant here, but the article in general covers a lot of AI writing styles

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#183

Post by bko »

lokar wrote: post #181
bko wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their wiki says they have ARR over 100m. Pretty impressive for a product that's 9 months old. 20x multiple is high sure, but hardly seems like friends giving friends money for ... reasons

It’s not so hard to get ARR if you don’t care about margin.

Cool, sounds like you discovered a life hack. Build something that can get $100m ARR while losing money, sell it, become billionaire.

Build something that can get 1k users. No in fact, build something that can get 100 users!

No offense, but you sounds like someone who has never actually had to build a business or product. It's hard to build something people use, even if its free. This isn't moviepass concept where they're literally selling $10 for $5, but even that's hard to sell! There are plenty of companies that try and fail to get tracking with moviepass economics.

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#184

Post by zingar »

bostik wrote: post #170
neilv wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the new AI startups I'm seeing are only offering terrible deals to early hires who could improve their chances of a nice exit. In this crazy environment -- in which money is flying around over AI much like the dotcom boom, but startup founders are using the last-decade playbook of not sharing the wealth with early hires -- I'm starting to think that smart AI job-seekers need to either: * get hired by a company th…

You've stumbled upon the same trade Matt Levine has been pointing out for a few months now. If you're good at AI, you could get hired at a top-tier company for 1-2M annual comp, and expect to stay there for at most five (5) years. That's a maximum of 10M pre-tax, and you'd be still on the receiving end of employment gauntlet. Alternatively you could spin up an AI startup, and get acquired for 75M+ in less than 2 year…

What’s your definition of “good at AI” sufficient to get 1m+ at a company already bursting with AI people?

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#185

Post by zingar »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #130
fhe wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but then again in this day and age maybe marketing skills are more important than anything else...

I have never heard about Manus before that post about them reaching 100M ARR or something. Where did they advertise?

AI influencers on YouTube were going wild with demos for about 2 weeks around the middle of this year. It was enough to get me to sign up to the manus wait list but by the time they told me I was in I’d realised how superficial the recommendations from the YouTube crowd were. Also I’d seen a few waves of hype like that and realised how bogus the content was.

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#186

Post by kemyd »

My guess is they had to sell to keep the lights on (similar to Windsurf).

They’re reportedly at ~$100M ARR, implying about $8.3–8.5M in monthly revenue (ARR = last month * 12).

At the same time, they claim to have processed 147T+ tokens. For context, pricing that volume on something like Sonnet 4.5 would come out to roughly $500M in API costs. They likely offset a chunk of that with open models, but for higher-quality outputs, they’re still paying meaningful amounts to Claude / OpenAI / Google.

Hard to make those numbers work without a lot of capital or an exit.

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#187

Post by cheema33 »

gubicle wrote: post #104
germinalphrase wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go on.

Consider the possibility that the people who make these decisions aren't actually all that smart and are easily manipulated by marketing and the sycophants/impostors they surround themselves with.

There is a lot of dumb money chasing AI related anything at this time. And there are people who know how to play the game.

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#188

Post by dheera »

stingraycharles wrote: post #131
android521 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mata acquired a great marketing team. Their marketing skills and hyping skills are far superior to their technical skils

How does due diligence work for these type of acquisitions, do they even have one? What do they think they’re buying? A team? Technology? A brand?

Due diligence is a joke in the first place, nobody actually does anything these days beyond flip through some Powerpoints. They think their hockey stick graphs are some diligence but in reality every graph is engineered to be a hockey stick.

The vast majority of whether a deal is good or bad has nothing to do with anything you could be duly diligent about. It has everything do with whether the founders are clever executors to capture market, and the luck of the company in the coming years, the latter you cannot predict.

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#189

Post by poly2it »

kemyd wrote: post #186

My guess is they had to sell to keep the lights on (similar to Windsurf). They’re reportedly at ~$100M ARR, implying about $8.3–8.5M in monthly revenue (ARR = last month * 12). At the same time, they claim to have processed 147T+ tokens. For context, pricing that volume on something like Sonnet 4.5 would come out to roughly $500M in API costs. They likely offset a chunk of that with open models, but for higher-qualit…

Is that input or output tokens or both? That number sounds quite extreme. Maybe they include input tokens from deep research? That could be tens of thousands of input tokens into a cheap model per task, for example.

Re: ManusAI Joins Meta

#190

Post by zingar »

TigerHix wrote: post #100
bigcat12345678 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am Chinese and AI founder since 2023 This statement is completely baseless 1. Manus was never targeting Chinese domestic market, for obvious reasons 2. Manus was founded by successful founder with exit, backed toptier investors in China, they always have great reputation in the AI industry 3. Prior to manus' launch, the team developed Monica, as they are the frontier AI chat bot aggregator I really felt disgusted b…

I am also Chinese and AI founder. > they always have great reputation in the AI industry Highly doubt this. > the team developed Monica, as they are the frontier AI chat bot aggregator How is this remotely technically impressive? LLM chat apps have been commoditized for years already. Even within the Chinese tech/AI community, Manus has often been frowned upon. People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manu…

> People literally built OpenManus the next day after Manus' launch marketing

This is not a good sign but may not be as terrible as it used to be: it seems like as soon as one idea makes money someone else is able to reproduce it fast. The barrier for defensibility is so much higher than before.

Post reply on HN