• by Colin Kirkland , 2 hours ago

With Meta planning to invest heavily in AI technology over the next three years, the tech giant has announced its acquisition of Manus, a Singapore-based AI start-up known for its proprietary autonomous general-purpose agents, which Meta plans to integrate into its social-media and business products.

Meta's deal with Manus -- a Chinese-owned company -- is valued at over $2 billion, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, partly due to AI agents’ ability to carry out tasks such as building websites, planning trips, screening job applicants, coding, analyzing market research and more autonomously.

While performing various tasks, Manus utilizes third-party AI models, including Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and different versions of Alibaba's Qwen.

Earlier this month, less than a year since its initial launch, the company issued a statement claiming that it had already onboarded millions of users and businesses, while also bringing in over $100 million in subscription revenue.

“Joining Meta allows us to build on a stronger, more sustainable foundation without changing how Manus works or how decisions are made,” said Manus CEO Xiao Hong in a company newsletter.

Meta will integrate Manus' general-purpose agents across its consumer and business products, including its Meta AI chatbot and its social-media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

In an attempt to ease any government-led fears of the Manus' Chinese ownership, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that following the acquisition, the startup will no longer have ties to Chinese investors, with a spokesperson adding that “Manus AI will discontinue its services and operations in China.”

Over the past year, Meta made notable increases in its AI investments goals, especially in promising AI companies.

For example, Meta recently spent $14.3 billion on Scale AI, a company that operates a global workforce of contractors who label images, text and video for machine learning applications – in order to secure the training data for its own AI models.

The tech giant also expanded its partnership with semiconductor design company Arm in a move to bring global efficiency to its future AI systems and its 3 billion app and technology users.

In November, Meta committed spending over $600 billion through 2028 in the U.S. alone as it competes against other leading tech companies investing heavily in AI, such as Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft.