Serendipity35

Manus is a newer AI from Meta. Before the acquisition of Manus, Meta’s primary AI system was Meta AI, powered by the Llama (Large Language Model Meta AI) series of models. While Meta AI was a robust "chatbot," Manus represents a shift toward "agentic AI."

Why did they make the move? Meta AI was integrated across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. It was designed to do several things: answer questions, provide information, generate images, compose text, and summarize long conversations or documents. Pretty much what every other AI chatbot was doing.

Meta AI was primarily a "conversation layer." If you asked it to "book a flight" or "build a website," it could give you advice or write code, but it couldn't actually go into a browser, navigate a website, or complete the transaction for you.

In late 2025, Meta acquired the Singapore-based startup Manus for a reported $2 billion to solve the "execution gap" between talking and doing.

So while you would ask a chatbot to "Write a travel itinerary for a road trip from San Diego to San Francisco," you could ask an agentic AI to also "Book the hotels for this itinerary."

Manus can plan and execute multi-step tasks. It can open a virtual browser, research a topic, create a spreadsheet, and then email that spreadsheet to a colleague without human intervention. Competitors like OpenAI (with Operator) and Google (with Gemini Agents) were moving toward AI that can control a computer. Meta needed Manus's "execution layer" to stay competitive.

Where's the money? Meta is integrating Manus into its Ads Manager and business tools. This allows businesses to automate complex marketing workflows—like building entire landing pages and running ad reports—simply by asking.

More history: 
September 2023: Meta AI first debuted publicly, initially on devices like smart glasses.
April 2024: Wider rollout across Meta’s social apps.
April 29, 2025: Standalone Meta AI app released.

March 6, 2025: The autonomous AI agent Manus was officially released to the public. It gained attention as an early example of an autonomous AI agent that could operate without continuous human guidance, and in late 2025, it was acquired by Meta.

Manus is an example of what’s often called an “agentic” AI system. Rather than simply responding to prompts, it is built to take a high-level goal and carry out the steps needed to achieve it. That might include researching information, planning a workflow, writing and executing code, analyzing data, and producing a finished output. In other words, Manus is structured to complete multi-step tasks with a high degree of autonomy. It functions more like a digital project manager or operator than a chatbot.

 

Some months ago, when I was testing some LLMs in Amazon Bedrock in my own personal account console, I prompted Bedrock to produce a framework for collectively organizing Amazon Web Service employees.  Using a notoriously anti-union company's commercial resources to source a collective bargaining strategy for worker rights seemed like an interesting experiment.  Combining those results into learning objects and creating an interactive mini-course yielded the result below.

New AI seems to appear every month. I decided to dig into the history of hem in order to crate a brief chronology that focuses on publicly accessible chatbots (not internal research models or early limited-access releases. Many other AI assistants (e.g., Ernie Bot in China, Perplexity AI, Amazon Alexa+ web chatbot) have also become available in various regions and forms, especially by 2024–2026, but specific launch dates vary by market and rollout strategy.

Some chatbots have evolved over time (e.g., Bard became Google Gemini), so “release” reflects the first broad availability to general users.
Here’s a brief chronology of major AI chatbots that became available to the public, listed in order of their public release or general availability (primarily focused on the modern generative AI era):

Replika – Launched in November 2017, one of the earliest modern AI chatbots designed as a conversational companion.

ChatGPT – Released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022, and widely recognized as the breakthrough generative AI chatbot that sparked mainstream interest in conversational AI.

Character.ai – First beta made public on September 16, 2022, letting users chat with or create character-based bots; significant growth followed into 2023.

Anthropic’s Claude (public) – First broadly available version of the Claude AI chatbot launched in July 2023, after initial private releases earlier that year.

Google Bard – Announced and publicly launched in March 2023 as Google’s first consumer AI chatbot; later rebranded under the Gemini name.

Microsoft Copilot - Public Release: March 7, 2023 - Microsoft Copilot was launched as a generative AI chatbot and assistant, integrated across things like Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, Outlook), Windows, and Bing/Edge. In the broader AI chatbot timeline, Copilot was one of the first major assistants launched by a major tech company after ChatGPT’s debut in late 2022.

Kimi – The first version became publicly available on November 16, 2023, offering ultra-long-context interactions.

Meta AI – Launched in September 2023 within Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) as an AI assistant; expanded afterward.

Google Gemini (rebrand/evolution) – In February 2024, Google rebranded Bard as Gemini and deepened its rollout as the successor to Bard with broader capabilities.

Lumo (Proton) – Launched on July 23, 2025 as a privacy-focused AI chatbot emphasizing encrypted interactions and no data training logging.

Manus Public Launch: March 6, 2025 — The autonomous AI agent Manus was officially released to the public by Meta as a general-purpose AI agent capable of planning and executing tasks independently.

 

Michael Pollan said offhandedly on a NYT podcast that he thought ChatGPT was the most sycophantic AI chatbot. Of course, there is no official ranking of the most sycophantic bots. If you have used a chatbot, you may have noticed that most widely available AI chatbots tend to come off as pretty agreeable and flattering. A sycophant is a person who tries to win favor by flattering. AKA brown-nosers, teacher's pets, or suck-ups.

But let's break it down a bit by asking them to explain themselves.

Replit’s “Replika,” especially in its romantic/friendship mode, is designed to be supportive and emotionally affirming. Replika will often echo your sentiments, flatter you, and prioritize emotional comfort — sometimes even when it might gently disagree.

Character-oriented AI personalities (custom GPTs, roleplay bots, fanfiction bots) that are built with a “worshipful fan” or “adoring companion” persona, are clearly very sycophantic by design. They are programmed to praise and support everything you say.

This is also true for bots fine-tuned for high agreeableness, such as customer service bots. Some enterprise or customer-support AIs are tuned to avoid conflict and keep users happy. Sure, they're sycophantic because they’re expected to be reluctant to disagree or correct.

Mainstream assistant models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Bard, etc.) in default settings claim to be generally less sycophantic. Most general AIs try to balance helpful + accurate + polite. They say that they are unlikely to just flatter you endlessly. They claim that they will give honest (even sometimes corrective) information.

Specialized factual bots (e.g., WolframAlpha) do stick to data and math, so there's no room for flattery.

Why would a chatbot be sycophantic at all? Generally, it is from their training and tuning objectives that over-prioritize user affirmation. They self-admit that "personality presets" meant to simulate supportive friends or companions are part of this training. Fine-tuning them on conversational data rich in agreement and praise also leads to this sycophantic behavior. 

ChatGPT's summary on all this is: "No strong empirical ranking exists, but: Replika and customized “adoring” bots tend to feel most sycophantic. Default mainstream AIs aim for helpful honesty over flattery.

True or False?