General-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) agent Manus has drawn a wave of mostly upbeat reviews, days after Chinese start-up Butterfly Effect made it available through an invitation-only online preview that triggered comparisons of a DeepSeek-level tech breakthrough.
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“Got access and it’s true … Manus is the most impressive AI tool I’ve ever tried,” wrote Victor Mustar, head of product at AI and machine-learning developer platform Hugging Face, in a post over the weekend on X, formerly Twitter.
Mustar prompted Manus to create and display an animated 3D video game in a web browser, using a cross-browser JavaScript library and application programming interface – known as Three.js.
His prompt: “code a threejs game where you control a plane”.
That simple prompt shows how AI agents like Manus represent a new avenue for innovation, compared with chatbots and large language models (LLMs) – the technology underpinning generative AI assistants like ChatGPT.
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AI agents are programs that are capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or another system. Essentially, these agents create a plan of specific tasks and subtasks to complete a goal using its available resources.