The once "hard-to-obtain" Manus has opened up sign up! How will AI applications in the era of intelligent beings monetize?

On May 13, the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reported that the AI intelligent agent platform Manus, which was once "hard to obtain a code", has recently fully opened for sign up. According to the official announcement, new registered users can receive 300 points for free every day and an additional one-time bonus of 1000 points. Previously, Manus's invitation code was once speculated to 100,000 yuan in the second-hand market.

The so-called points are the "currency" used to perform tasks. After Manus receives user instructions, it will consume points in real-time while executing the tasks, and the amount of points consumed depends on the scale and difficulty of the tasks.

According to tests by the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, whether writing a popular science article of several thousand words or coding a segment of a web game, Manus only consumes around 200 points. Therefore, in actual operation, general free users may not be restricted by the daily limit of 300 points, but can adjust the task content according to their own needs.

However, when users try to command Manus to perform larger and more complex tasks, the free points provided by the platform are somewhat insufficient. To meet different needs, Manus has launched various upgrade plans for users to choose from (19 dollars, 39 dollars, or 199 dollars per month). Among them, users who pay a subscription fee of 199 dollars per month can receive 19,900 additional points per month and have the capability to execute 5 tasks simultaneously.

To promote the commercialization of Manus, its parent company Butterfly Effect recently completed a new round of financing of $75 million at a valuation of $500 million, planning to use the funds to expand its services to other markets including the United States, Japan, and the Middle East.

In the domestic market, in March of this year, Manus announced a strategic cooperation with the Ali Tongyi Qianwen team, where both parties will implement all of Manus's functions based on the Tongyi Qianwen series of open-source models on domestic models and computing power platforms. Currently, the two technical teams have begun close collaboration.

According to research reports from multiple brokerages, with the major AI giants pushing for the commercialization of intelligent agent products, 2025 is expected to be the inaugural year for AI Agents. Haitong International pointed out that recently, ByteDance released several intelligent agent tools, and Alibaba's Fliggy launched a travel intelligent agent. Currently, the implementation of Agents has become a mainstream trend in the AI industry, with leading internet companies like ByteDance and Alibaba accelerating their efforts.

Minsheng Securities stated that AI Agent is an inevitable path, and it has become an industry consensus that internet giants are simultaneously focusing on both C-end and B-end. In the future, AI Agent is expected to be implemented first in various industries such as manufacturing, education, finance, retail, and justice.

Southwest Securities analysis indicates that at the application layer, intelligent agent applications are divided into cross-industry general products and vertical professional products. The former is relatively mature, with some products already starting to be scaled up, while the latter has a slightly later start to commercialization but is expected to become an important lever for B-end digital transformation.

The organization further analyzes the monetization logic of the current Agent products: Currently, the initial products of the agent, such as Cursor and Glean, have achieved annual recurring revenue of over one hundred million dollars, demonstrating a high potential for growth, and new charging models based on actual delivery results, task completion rates, and other indicators have emerged.

Overall, AI agent products are forming an evolutionary path of infrastructure and application synergy characterized by "upgrading underlying model capabilities + thriving intermediary tools + landing commercial scenarios." In the future, AI agent applications need to further enhance planning capabilities, possess better memory, and have stronger multimodal understanding capabilities to unleash monetization potential.

In terms of investment, Minsheng Securities believes that similar to the "Moore's Law" of chips, the task length of AI Agents may double every 7 months, ultimately achieving a closed-loop flywheel where Agents develop Agents. Agents may become an important catalyst for the revaluation of software, and the target market for software vendors is expected to expand to trillions of dollars in the labor market. AI Agents are also expected to enhance the consumption attributes of software and further break the valuation ceiling for software vendors.

In terms of investment targets, the institution suggests focusing on: 1) Office: Kingsoft Office, Hehe Information, Foxit Software, etc.; 2) Programming: Zhuoyue Information, Puyuan Information, Jin Modern, etc.; 3) Terminal AI: Zhongke Chuangda, Yingshi Network, etc.

In addition to software, Guosheng Communication believes that Agent will unlock the ceiling for inference computing power. Various institutions are actively developing Agent, and the competitive landscape is unstable; the demand for Agent computing power is not comparable to simple text responses.

Tianfeng Securities believes that the ecosystem centered around the Alibaba chain, with its strong accumulation in traffic entry, model capabilities, cloud, and self-owned hardware, combined with Tongyi Qianwen's layout in vertical ecosystems in industries such as finance and government, is expected to become the "chain master" for the landing of B-end agents in China, driving the development of related ecosystems. Against this backdrop, the domestic computing power sector is expected to benefit from policy support for self-control and technological iteration, with a continued upward trend in prosperity.

Source: Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily

Author: Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily