The least surprising chapter of the Manus story is what’s happening right now
Okay, so the U.S. and China are locked in an all-out race to build the most powerful AI on the planet. Beijing is throwing billions at homegrown models, tightening its grip on the tech sector, and watching nervously as its best AI talent gravitates to U.S. companies. Yet Manus — one of China’s most buzzed-about AI startups — quietly relocated to Singapore and sold itself to Meta for $2 billion. Did anyone think there would not be a reckoning over this tie-up? As industry watchers know, Manus burst onto the scene in the spring of last year with a demo video showing an AI agent screening job candidates, planning vacations, and analyzing stock portfolios, and it cheekily claimed it outperformed OpenAI’s Deep Research. Within weeks, Benchmark — the consummate Silicon…
