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?

Manus AI is reportedly the world's first fully autonomous AI agent. But what does that mean? And what is it capable of?

Unlike ChatGPT, Claude, and other single-model systems, Manus claims to be the "world's first general AI agent" by using multiple AI models working in tandem — such as Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen, and various independent agents to tackle a wide range of tasks.

Manus wasn’t developed entirely from scratch. According to reports on social media, the platform uses a combination of existing and fine-tuned AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude and Alibaba’s Qwen, to perform tasks such as drafting research reports and analyzing financial filings.