The First Manus Cup Singapore Concept Essay Competition

"The tribute essays have arrived 👊🇸🇬🔥"

With Manus getting acquired by Meta, the immediate consequence is that today has become a Singapore-themed essay contest.

I carefully read through the submissions flooding my Moments, Xiaohongshu, and WeChat official accounts, and I've identified two main prompts:

Prompt one: "A few things between me and Manus," with the core thesis being that I'm tight with Red Xiao, Peak, and the crew. (There's an alternative for those who can't claim that—if you don't know anyone at Manus, you can always namedrop Yuan Liu.)

Prompt two: Marveling at the impeccable timing and the brilliance of going Singapore/expat, the kind preferred by students good at grand narratives. It has that satisfying Zhihu-commenter-vibes of armchair analyzing the Four Crossings of the Chishui River, but what it really means is: I'm smart, I understand decision-making.

Regrettably, some classmates have taken the clout-chasing to夸张 levels, straight-up posting WeChat chat screenshots with the aforementioned people. This fully demonstrates the severe, cliff-like decline in clout-chasing skills between the post-90s and post-00s generations 😭

I believe the most legitimate clout-chaser here is Luo Yihang, founder of Silicon Star, because Yuan Liu originally discovered Red Xiao at a hackathon Luo organized, and invested $1 million.

Luo mentioned that back then, all it cost him was an Apple Watch. I interpret this as him asking for his FA fee.

Though Teacher Luo was originally a Manus hater, he quickly saw the light and chose to believe in and support our Chinese founder—truly an honest and loyal man 👍

Back to business. I'm a clout-chaser who deeply respects reality, and I've also come up with a reasonable explanation for Manus's $2 billion acquisition price (Bloomberg's figure).

The 0.4% OpenAI Valuation Method.

Manus's acquisition price is roughly equivalent to 0.4% of OpenAI.

Here's my reasoning. In a previous article, Manus Is Still the GOAT, I sharply criticized the fact that the biggest problem with general-purpose agents is that they're useless.

The vast majority of my needs can be met by ChatGPT. The only remaining need that Manus handles better is finding Red Alert maps. ChatGPT can only find download links, but Manus can package them directly into a zip file.

But flip that around — can't Manus also siphon off some ChatGPT users?

I've been deliberately using Manus this past month, mainly because I wanted to nitpick now that my hometown boy made it big, and secondarily to see what progress a year of clout-chasing has produced.

My daily needs are roughly: "Are American netizens talking about execution thresholds yet?" "Is it cheaper to buy a MacBook Air on JD.com or at a Shanghai Apple Store?" "Find me a few more 8-player Red Alert maps."

The results were tear-jerking.

Manus completed all these tasks well, satisfying my needs as quickly as ChatGPT. And because I refuse to let my Singapore hometown boy squeeze money out of me, the free version of Manus is actually faster than GPT Thinking.

So there are benefits to not paying 😭

My user experience is that Manus is indeed an AI product that can satisfy users' daily information needs. Most of my hometown boys definitely use ChatGPT, but this past year has also proven that some hometown boys use Manus to meet their needs.

However, since I don't read AI-generated research reports, I've never used the new feature Manus later emphasized, "Deep Research." For me, Manus and ChatGPT have no substantive difference, so I naturally choose the latter.

But either way, we can reasonably infer two conclusions.

Manus is equivalent to 1% of ChatGPT. I pulled this number out of thin air — you get the idea. Because nobody knows what ChatGPT alone should be valued at.

The Manus team can create hype, and create new hype. The truth speaks for itself, fam.

I'm probably the blogger who respects clout-chasing the most on the entire internet. Recently someone asked me to sharply critique Kimi, and I said Kimi is significantly better than the "two brothers who crashed the market" because Kimi can still pull off some consumer-facing stunts, instead of just flexing that they're from Tsinghua / post-95.

So the conclusion is simple and clear.

I think Manus didn't extract enough coins from the lizard man. It doesn't matter if it's a black cat or white cat — any cat that can extract coins from the evil lizard man is a good cat. This evil fake human who treats face like feces only respects those who can hurt him, only values those who can extract his coins.

Manus genuinely alleviated Meta's anxiety and provided enormous emotional value to the evil lizard Mark Zuckerberg. Clearly $2 billion in extracted coins is not enough.

Alexandr Wang is exactly the kind of character MiraclePlus mass-produces — an ego-exploding startup bro you run into every two weeks in Zhongguancun — and he somehow extracted $14.3 billion in lizard man coins.

I feel like with the Manus team's daredevil energy and solid clout-chasing talent, they shouldn't be extracting less than a startup bro. How did it end up as Manus equals 1/7 of an Alexandr Wang 😭

The thought of the Manus gentlemen having to report to a crazy startup bro makes me more upset than seeing my hometown boys get rich 😭

Finally, I want to ask two key questions.

Does Monica, with its $12 million ARR, keep going? If not, want to sell it to Zhipu AI, help a domestic LLM company boost its gross margin and C-end revenue? Don't forget your roots just because you're joining the lizard man 😭

Nobody's even discussing the two brothers' IPO anymore — the masses have been drawn back to the狠活 from the Manus hometown boys. Manus owes the two market-crashing brothers so much 😭

One more question: I've followed Guo Yu for years, and my Twitter feed keeps pushing this middle-aged bald man's happy retirement life at me.

So I curiously asked one of the Manus bros, "Are you guys going to become Guo Yu?"

The bro replied, "[Face with tears of joy], we still have to work. It's joining Meta, not selling and running."

Alas, I've already mentally scripted the whole playbook of dealing with the lizard man — infiltrating, slicing the sausage, kicking people out 😭

(Images in this article generated by GPT; text purely human-written)