Recently, the news of AI Agent product Manus relocating its headquarters to Singapore and domestic team layoffs has attracted attention.
Manus' official Weibo and Xiaohongshu are suspected to have been cleared, and the Weibo account that collaborated with Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen in March this year has also been deleted.
Weibo cleared
Xiaohongshu cleared
The official announcement of cooperation with Tongyi at that time
Tongyi enthusiastically reposted, but Manus deleted the original text, appearing to be Tongyi's wishful thinking. Manus only left a small red heart in the comment section ❤️。
Manus platform announced on March 11th that it will officially establish a strategic partnership with Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen team. Both parties will implement all functions of Manus on domestic models and computing platforms based on the Tongyi Qianwen series open-source model. At present, the two technical teams have been closely collaborating to create more creative general intelligent agent products for Chinese users. We look forward to bringing Manus' innovative experience to Chinese users as soon as possible through this collaboration.
According to Blue Whale, regarding Manus' collaboration with Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen to develop a Chinese version, employees have stated that they will not continue to push forward.
Recently, there have been numerous rumors on various social media platforms that the previously popular AI Agent Manus has been laying off employees. According to reports, Manus has a total of about 120 employees in the China region, of which more than 40 core technical personnel have been transferred to the Singapore headquarters, while the remaining employees are facing layoffs and optimization. The compensation standard for layoffs is N+3 or 2N
Although job postings were released in Singapore beforehand, this adjustment appears somewhat rushed for employees. Blue Whale News reported that it was not until Monday of this week that the company officially notified employees and conducted talks, explaining that there were "adjustments to the company's structure".
On July 10th, Manus AI founder and CEO Xiao Hong posted on social media about the relocation:
Today, we are still in the early days of AI, and giving up short-term income or even adjusting business models to enable more people to use it is something that can be done. On this basis, ARR is clearly not the correct excitation function.
To excel in a globalized market, there are many troubles that do not come from the business itself or user value itself. Occasionally, I also recall the saying from my idol in college, 'How much hardship is beyond words'.
But all of this is worth it. On the one hand, because the journey itself has many happy things that allow oneself and the team to grow. On the other hand, if there are good results in the end, proving that as a Chinese born founder, we can also do well in global products in the new environment, that would be great! ”
Previously, the homepage of the Manus official website showed that the Chinese version was under development. The information is no longer available. Upon entering the official website, it appears that Manus is not available in your region.
The manus.comn Chinese domain name that was successfully registered in March is still inaccessible.
That is to say, products born in China are not available in China. Global products that were once popular and difficult to obtain, were released on the internet and moved to Singapore, claiming to be based on the world, have been financed by giants and do not lack technical partners, but are not available in China.
What exactly are its difficulties? If it's a restriction from certain companies, why can't we even cooperate with Tongyi? What exactly is the 'unspeakable hardship' among the founding population?
Currently, Manus' overseas accounts are still being updated normally.
