Chinese researchers’ AI prowess is again a hot topic after a startup called Monica.im last week revealed “Manus”, a service it bills as a “general agent” that might improve on tools offered by Western companies.

Chinese start-up Butterfly Effect, creator of general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) agent Manus, appears poised to shake up the red-hot domestic market for large language models (LLMs), as it focuses on applications beyond ChatGPT-like chatbots.

The Manus chatbot and AI agent from The Butterfly Effect went viral, with some seeing it as the next DeepSeek sensation out of China. Is it?