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.

After running the Manus prompts on ChatGPT, I can see why the new AI assistant has drawn more comparison to DeepSeek. It does seem to execute prompts in impressive ways. If you're a researcher, a designer, or someone who needs deeply researched lesson plans and multimedia integration, Manus makes sense, if you can get an invite.

Some early users were enthusiastic about the product’s capabilities; others complained it took too long and crashed.