Following “DeepSeek,” the emergence of “Manus” shows a terrifying potential in China’s artificial intelligence (AI) rise, surpassing OpenAI in performance. Chinese AI corporations are utilizing low-spec chips and new learning algorithms to break high-cost structures while maximizing performance.
◇ Manus, beyond AI assistant to ‘work automation’
On the 7th, the industry noted that Chinese AI startup Manus AI has demonstrated performance surpassing the OpenAI model by recording the highest score in the GAIA benchmark test on its official website. GAIA is a metric that evaluates an AI's problem-solving capabilities, serving as a benchmark to measure how well AI can perform practical tasks rather than just a simple language model test.
According to the company, while existing AI models have focused on text generation and Q&A functions, Manus is characterized by its ability to perform actual tasks, such as financial analysis, report writing, website creation, and data processing. It supports automatic conversion of PDFs to PPTs, automatic report generation after searching real estate listings, resume screening, and stock analysis functions.
Currently in beta testing, sign-up is only possible with an invitation code, and it is generating buzz in China enough to appear on Weibo's trending search.
Xiao Hong, the founder of Manus AI and a serial entrepreneur from the '90s generation, has multiple entrepreneurial experiences since college. His company, established in 2015, “Yeying Technology,” has a history of receiving hundreds of millions of yuan (hundreds of billions won) in investments from companies like Tencent.
The Manus development team has garnered praise for its technical expertise, including a developer of an iOS browser who appeared on the cover of Forbes China, and a product development leader from AI corporation 'Guang Nian Zhi Wai'.
Zhi Yi Chao, co-founder and chief engineer of Manus AI, stated in a video on the company's website that "AI is evolving from a mere assistant tool to maximize human productivity,” and noted that “Manus will be a 'game changer' in transforming work methods across corporations and industries."
◇ “It’s not just DeepSeek” as Alibaba and Tencent join in
The emergence of Manus is a case that shows the rapid growth of the Chinese AI market. Earlier this year, DeepSeek recorded performance surpassing the OpenAI model using Nvidia's low-spec graphics processing unit (GPU) H800 chip, shaking the AI market.
Alibaba also joined the competition by unveiling the AI model “QwQ-32B,” which boasts a better cost-performance ratio than DeepSeek this week. QwQ-32B is reported to exceed OpenAI's low-cost inference model “OpenAI-o1-mini” and is on par with DeepSeek-R1.
To keep pace in the AI competition, Tencent announced last month that it developed the AI model “Hunyuan Turbo S,” which can answer questions in under a second. The inference model “T1,” based on Hunyuan Turbo S, has been embedded in Tencent's AI chatbot “Yuanbao.”
According to Tencent, this model boasts a faster response speed than DeepSeek's inference model R1, achieving superior performance in major benchmarks such as MMLU (knowledge), AIME2024 (mathematics), LiveCodeBench (coding), and surpassing GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Llama 3.1, and DeepSeek V3.
There is also analysis suggesting that the AI competition is evolving from a technological struggle to a 'national power struggle.' Developing AI models requires super-large computing infrastructure, significant investment, and vast data resources, making AI dominance a field directly linked to national competitiveness, akin to past nuclear weapon development. In fact, both the U.S. and China are designating AI as a strategic technology and continuing to provide government-level support.
Kim Myung-joo, director of the AI Safety Research Institute at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), said that "China has focused on AI development and innovation, such as AI foundation models, for a long time, and the number of specialized personnel in AI development is at least 10 times greater than that of Korea,” and “The recent announcements, like Manus, are not recent plans but results of sustained focus at the national level for a long time."