China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus
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Re: China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus
#2Poor Meta. AI is really just not working out for them.
Re: China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus
#3Funny when you consider the world owes a lot of AI advancements to both Meta and Google, their open releases really did shift things, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, especially for China, which as far as I know were not releasing as much in AI as they have been beforehand. I remember when Meta released Llama originally people were speculating about it, but it wound up producing a lot of projects that used it, I'm sure some in China. I know that Perplexity has its own custom model on top of Llama that they use for their default model, and its pretty darn good.
Re: China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus
#4Funny that Manus already shows "by meta" along with the logo pretty prominently.
Re: China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus
#5Funny when you consider the world owes a lot of AI advancements to both Meta and Google, their open releases really did shift things, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, especially for China, which as far as I know were not releasing as much in AI as they have been beforehand. I remember when Meta released Llama originally people were speculating about it, but it wound up producing a lot of projects that used it, I…
Wasn’t Llama a leak that got so popular meta decided to change their whole approach?
I was working at Google at the time. Before Llama, releasing weights was not even worth a discussion.
Re: China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus
#6> After a $75 million fundraising round led by U.S. venture firm Benchmark in May 2025, Manus shut its China offices in July, laying off dozens of employees. It then moved its operations to Singapore.
> It was not immediately clear on what grounds China was seeking the annulment of a deal involving a Singapore-based company and how, if at all, a completed acquisition transaction would be unwound.
> Manus' two co-founders, CEO Xiao Hong and chief scientist Ji Yichao, were summoned to Beijing for talks with regulators in March and later barred from leaving the country, five sources familiar with the matter said.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Re: China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus
#7>not immediately clear on what grounds China was seeking the annulment of a deal involving a Singapore-based company and how, if at all, a completed acquisition transaction would be unwound.
Interesting. I wonder what sorts of threats China could make to back up this demand, or if this is more of a warning for future acquisitions in the space.
Re: China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus
#8Can we finally acknowledge the obvious Singapore-washing that Chinese companies have been doing for years or are we going to keep pretending?
Re: China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus
#9This will be awkward, given the acquisition is already complete
Re: China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus
#10>not immediately clear on what grounds China was seeking the annulment of a deal involving a Singapore-based company and how, if at all, a completed acquisition transaction would be unwound. Interesting. I wonder what sorts of threats China could make to back up this demand, or if this is more of a warning for future acquisitions in the space.
"Your families live here", maybe "We have shadow police stations across the world", the playbook is well established