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China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus

cnbc.com

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Re: China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus

#11

Post by giancarlostoro »

henry2023 wrote: post #5
giancarlostoro wrote: post #3

Funny 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.

Not sure, but open weights have had their effects. For example, look at Wan 2.2 the last open weights Wan release, still the most powerful Video inference out there, to the level of quality it provides, unfortunately, it went closed source, but before they did, the community had built all sorts of tooling and LoRas on top of it. Nothing comes close for video a year later. Back to llama though, look at all the open models people run offline through their Macs. It definitely had a net positive.

Re: China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus

#14

Post by stego-tech »

some_random wrote: post #10
zonkerdonker wrote: post #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.

"Your families live here", maybe "We have shadow police stations across the world", the playbook is well established

I mean, they're just cribbing what America did, and what the British Empire did before that.

It's a disgusting playbook, but it's also an effective one if you're a state trying to exert control over important players or entities.

Re: China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus

#16

Post by stego-tech »

wxw wrote: post #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-foun…

I suspect this is more of a warning shot to others attempting the same playbook ("Singapore-washing", as I've heard folks call it): the state is watching, and shifting geopolitics means it's in their interest to retain successful talent and entities at home rather than let opposition have them.

If anything, I'm genuinely surprised it took them this long. America's been doing this for decades without much in the way of pushback, so China must feel very confident in its position to use such tactics.

Re: China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus

#19

Post by _fat_santa »

Besides the fact that the founders are in China and are barred from leaving, is there anything that prevents Manus/Meta from just telling the CCP to kick rocks?

Sure they can object to it or claim they are "blocking" the sale, but is there really anything they can do considering that Manus is no longer within their jurisdiction?

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