Manus AI Founder, Tao Zhang: Turning Intent into Intelligent Action

Join Tao Zhang, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer of Manus AI, for a candid conversation on building one of the year’s most talked-about agentic AI products. From the team behind the hit browser extension Monica (20M users), TA shares how Manus evolved from an AI browser experiment into a cloud-run general agent that lets anyone launch complex workflows—no coding required. Hear the story behind Manus’s viral March 6, 2025 launch, a 3.5M-person waitlist, and how the team solved massive inference capacity challenges to open access in May.
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Key discussion points include:

• Vision: A product capable of 24/7 inference per user—shifting from Q&A chatbots to continuous, autonomous work.
• From Monica → Manus: Why “copy-paste with ChatGPT” is broken, and how embedding AI in-context changes usage.
• Agent design for everyone: Building the “right panel of Cursor” for non-coders; hiding model complexity to keep UX simple.
• Scaling reality: Agents consume ~1,000× more tokens than chat—how Manus optimized tokens, caching, and cloud supply.
• Model choices: Benchmarking monthly; current stack uses Anthropic Claude Sonnet and Google Gemini 2.5 Profor performance.
• Slides that don’t suck: Generating polished decks via HTML/CSS/JS → PowerPoint for consultants, bankers, and PMs.
• Benchmark signals: Strong results on agent evaluations (e.g., GAIA-style tasks), focusing on product over leaderboard gaming.
• Culture & speed: Founders who can zoom in/out across product, science, and GTM to ship fast and learn faster.

Exploring autonomous agents, AI slide generation, or no-code AI? Watch now—and like, comment, and subscribe for more frontline insights from the RAISE Summit. Try Manus AI and experience the next era of AI tools.