AI Agent

Manus keeps making headlines — most recently for regaining independence from Meta and moving HQ to Singapore. Behind the drama is a genuinely useful product; here's what it is and what it can do.

Manus is officially back on its own: the AI agent pioneer acquired by Meta is resuming operations as an independent company in Singapore. But the split comes at a hard cost — data deletion before Aug 23.

Ask a vision-language model what's inside a box and it answers correctly. Ask it to act on that structure — and it fails. MindTopo benchmark reveals VLMs' spatial reasoning gap in action.

DeepSeek quietly registered its "DeepSeek Harness" team — one of the clearest signals that AI's center of gravity has moved. The lab that built its reputation on models is now building the layer around them.

The cleanest sign yet that AI pricing is being re-measured: the same week Anthropic scrapped a planned 50% Sonnet 5 hike and OpenAI slashed GPT-5.6 Luna by 80%, DeepSeek raised prices — shifting to cost per task.

China's largest AI assistant just started collecting tolls. ByteDance's Doubao now takes a 12% commission on hotel bookings in-app, has shipped three paid tiers — AI agents are becoming commerce hubs.

A number that should stop you cold: a market research startup with fewer than 60 employees is now worth $2 billion — roughly 60% of the market cap of NIQ, a global top-five firm with 38,800 staff.

A 60-person AI company just got valued at $2 billion — nearly six-tenths of NIQ, the research giant with 38,800 employees. Simile has been around for barely two years. AI just repriced the industry.

Simile, a market research startup with fewer than 60 employees, just raised at a $2 billion valuation. NIQ employs roughly 38,800 people. Simulated consumers are redefining what research is worth.

A 25-year gap, closed in seven days. Microsoft Research's Dimitris Papailiopoulos, working with GPT-5.6 and Claude Fable 5, produced a proof that a simple two-step algorithm solves MIMO detection.

For two years the story of AI progress has been compute. BigBang-V1's open-source release points at a quieter bottleneck: data. 100% AI-synthesized training data may run the data layer's RSI loop.