Meta Platforms is acquiring Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that’s become the talk of Silicon Valley since it debuted last spring with a demo video that showed an AI agent doing things like screening job candidates, planning vacations, and analyzing stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI’s Deep Research.The company recently announced it has since signed up millions of users for and was generating annual recurring revenue of more than $100 million from monthly and year subscribers to its membership service.Meta says it’ll keep Manus running independently, and weave the startup’s AI agents into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, where Meta’s own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users. Why are the American companies so obsessed with AI ?

