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3、ecision.Refer to important disclosures on page 9 to 13.Analyst Certification on page 6.Price Objective Basis/Risk on page 5.12803301 Software-China AI agent“Manus”launch:one step forward for AI tool to become coworker Industry Overview Launch of Manus to spark transition from LLM to AI agent Followi
4、ng recent Open Source Week of DeepSeek(see our 3 March 2025 report for our takeaways),a startup company(Butterfly Effect HK Limited)released the first general AI agent(Manus)for beta test on 6 March,per news reports.Manus is able to think independently,plan and execute complex tasks,and deliver comp
5、lete results,compared to other LLMs,such as DeepSeek,which only gives answers/suggestions to users requests.Manus achieved better performance than OpenAI DeepResearch in the benchmark test for general AI assistants(GAIA),demonstrating its technological strength.The company also plans to open source
6、some of these models specifically post-trained for Manus later this year.We see the following industry implications:1)acceleration of AI agent development/application,2)potential better demand for AI computing power(AI chips,data center,cloud)given that AI agents consume more tokens than LLM,and 3)m