On March 11, Forbes published an article saying that Manus is far from a novelty. It claims to be autonomous, but in reality it's just another big language model that executes a pre-scripted workflow. Similar to tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini, the core of Manus is still to generate "greatest common denominator" answers based on the Internet corpus. Tests showed that when asked to write an outline of a report about Manus, the system automatically emphasized market hot words such as "technical breakthrough" and "universal capabilities." Commentators pointed out thatThe working mechanism of Manus is destined to only produce content that is in line with hot topics but lacks depth.
Forbes said that Manus performed well when formulating standardized travel plans, but when it came to complex decisions (such as flight changes due to unexpected weather), the system exposed flaws similar to the OpenAIDeep Research model - it was unable to identify key data priorities and generated solutions that seemed reasonable but were actually full of loopholes.
Forbes believes thatAI companies that truly create value build structured workflows in specific areas.. For example, Octomind simulates user behavior by parsing web page code to achieve end-to-end automated testing; Flank embeds expert decision-making logic in legal document generation to accurately handle compliance reviews; r2decide dynamically generates personalized sales suggestions based on consumption data and reshapes e-commerce shopping links. These cases all show that the success of AI lies not in its versatility, but in its deep focus on business scenarios.
When Manus promoted its "universal agent" vision, industry pioneers had already established moats in vertical fields such as medical care and finance.——Improve reliability by limiting the scope of decision-making, and make up for algorithm shortcomings with the help of human-machine collaboration mechanism.
Forbes also said that for AI, human supervision is crucial. Most companies face difficulties in effectively integrating AI into their decision-making processes. Cornell course feedback reveals that current technology cannot replace core human decision-making abilities.Manus has done very little in human-machine collaborative decision-making.
The multi-APP linkage demonstrated by Manus may seem cool, but in fact it does not break through the inherent limitations of automation tools. On the other hand, Amazon's Alexa will be deeply embedded into office ecosystems such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, achieving context awareness through API-level integration.Forbes questions whether Manus can achieve this level of integration in the short term.