Meta’s next big AI bet: Manus

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Meta’s AI shopping spree continues — this time with Manus, a fast-rising AI agent startup that would soon power end-to-end automation across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Because the AI race moves past model one-upmanship toward tools that truly get work done, does this signal a more grounded phase of Zuckerberg’s AI strategy, and a broader reset in how Big Tech plans to win the subsequent phase of AI?

In today’s AI rundown:

• Meta acquires AI agent startup Manus for $2B+

• SoftBank completes $40B OpenAI investment

• Design higher web sites with Cursor’s recent editor

• Satya Nadella: AI to shift from ‘spectacle’ to ‘substance’

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MANUS & META

💰 Meta acquires AI agent startup Manus for $2B+

The Rundown: Meta just announced the acquisition of AI agent startup Manus for a reported figure of over $2B, adding a top-performing agentic system and revenue-generating product to its aggressive AI expansion.

The main points:

• Manus offers autonomous agents for tasks like deep research and coding, with the startup crossing $100M in annual revenue just 8 months post-launch.

• The startup was founded in Beijing in 2022, relocated to Singapore this yr, and can now cut all China operations and ownership ties.

• Manus tops Scale’s RLI benchmark, which measures the flexibility to handle real-world, beneficial work — though scores haven’t been updated since October.

• Manus CEO Xiao Hong will join Meta’s leadership under COO Javier Olivan, bringing roughly 100 employees with him.

Why it matters: After a period of quiet, Zuck is making one other big AI swing. With Manus topping benchmarks running Claude (and after Meta’s own model struggles), the move gives Meta a profitable, production-ready agent platform now, with the choice to swap in its recent rumored internal systems in the event that they could make the leap to the frontier.

TOGETHER WITH GOFUNDME GIVING FUNDS

🎁 Make year-end giving easy

The Rundown: The year-end giving deadline is today. Open a free Giving Fund in seconds, get a right away tax deduction, and choose where to donate later — or invest your fund to grow your impact over time.

With GoFundMe Giving Funds, you may:

• Contribute money today for tax advantages

• Streamline year-end giving with one receipt

• Support your favorite nonprofits

Start your year-end giving now.

OPENAI & SOFTBANK

💸 SoftBank completes $40B OpenAI investment

The Rundown: SoftBank has reportedly accomplished its $40B investment in OpenAI, in keeping with CNBC — wiring the ultimate $22B+ last week after months of asset sales and fundraising to drag together the biggest single bet on the AI race.

The main points:

• To fund the deal, Masayoshi Son sold SoftBank’s entire $5.8B Nvidia stake, $4.8B of T-Mobile shares, and likewise slowed his Vision Fund dealmaking.

• The initial investment in February valued OpenAI at $260B, though recent IPO rumors have pushed potential valuations as high as $1T.

• OpenAI can be reportedly in talks for extra funding from Amazon, and recently finalized a $1B licensing and investment deal from Disney.

Why it matters: OpenAI and Anthropic are each reportedly eyeing a 2026 IPO in a race to define how public markets value frontier AI. SoftBank’s $40B is a belief that OpenAI gets there first — and that Sam Altman and co. can hold off the competition to proceed to be the industry-defining moneymaker that Son likes to bet big on.

AI TRAINING

🎨 Design higher web sites with Cursor’s recent editor

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn learn how to quickly arrange and use Cursor’s recent visual design editor to refine your frontend design without having to change backwards and forwards with a design tool like Figma.

Step-by-step:

1. Open a brand new project in Cursor with an HTML and CSS file (update required) — ask the Cursor agent to construct a straightforward index.html + styles.css, or use a template

2. Install the live server extension: hit CMD+Shift+P, search “Open with Live Server,” then copy the URL and paste it into the Cursor browser (CMD+Shift+B)

3. Toggle on the element selector, click any element to edit properties within the Design pane, or tell the agent what changes you wish within the energetic chat

4. Hit Apply for the agent to make changes — click “Keep” or “Keep All” to avoid wasting (agent auto-updates classes so changes apply to all matching elements)

Pro tip: Be sure that you’re saving progress with Git as you go. Git will make it easier to roll back any unwanted style changes.

PRESENTED BY BLAND AI

📞 Voice AI, what CIOs should know

The Rundown: In San Francisco, there’s an organization called Bland AI that replaces IVRs with AI voice agents that accurately represent your brand, understand your customers, and resolve calls end-to-end. No phone trees. No hold music. Just faster, smarter customer conversations.

Here’s what CIOs love about Bland agents:

• All the time on, all the time improving – agents that learn from every call

• Built for first-touch resolution – handles complex, multi-step conversations

• Enterprise-ready control – own your AI while protecting your data

Wish to explore in your company? Book a demo today.

2026 OUTLOOK

✨ Satya Nadella: AI to shift from ‘spectacle’ to ‘substance’

The Rundown: Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella just shared his 2026 outlook, arguing that AI is entering a phase where we are able to see between “spectacle” and “substance,” and success can be measured less by model breakthroughs and more by real outcomes.

The main points:

• Nadella said AI is shifting from discovery to diffusion, with capabilities outpacing our ability to show them into real impact, making a “model overhang.”

• He noted that AI should function as scaffolding for human potential, with teams pushing toward a brand new equilibrium that accounts for AI-equipped colleagues.

• The following wave of progress, he argued, will come from systems fairly than standalone models, with orchestration being the important thing to real-world value.

• Nadella also framed AI as a socio-technical test, where societal permission to the tech can be earned only by solving real problems for people and the planet.

Why it matters: As model capabilities proceed to speed up — led by Google and OpenAI, Nadella’s outlook is a breath of fresh air. It shifts the conversation away from raw performance numbers and back to outcomes, grounding AI’s next phase in value for people and the planet fairly than one other race for capability alone.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 Manus – SOTA general AI agent, newly acquired by Meta

• 🗣️ Chatterbox Turbo – Resemble AI’s fast, expressive, open-source TTS model

• 🏃‍♂️ Hunyuan Motion 1.0 – Open-source text-to-3D character animation model

• 📱 MAI-UI – Alibaba’s AI agent to autonomously control smartphone apps

📰 Every part else in AI today

dbt Labs released a recent O’Reilly report on constructing AI applications with governed, discoverable, and AI-ready analytics infrastructure.*

Elon Musk announced that xAI has acquired a constructing for MACROHARDRR, its third supersized data center, which is able to increase xAI’s training compute to almost 2GW.

Zhipu AI launched a $560M share sale in Hong Kong with an estimated $6.6B valuation, with the IPO listing coming on the heels of its GLM-4.7 launch.

Alibaba introduced MAI-UI, an AI agent that may autonomously control smartphone apps and complete multi-step tasks on mobile devices.

Tencent open-sourced Hunyuan Motion 1.0, a 1B parameter model that generates 3D character animations from text prompts to be used in games and animation pipelines.

Adobe announced a partnership with AI video startup Runway, bringing its technology and models — including the most recent Gen-4.5 release — to the Adobe Firefly AI studio.

*Sponsored Listing

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Vic V. within the U.K.:

“I needed to create a pretty big workshop program meant to cover six months. I asked ChatGPT to assist me construct it by feeding in the e-mail conversation between the organizer and me, and this system it got here up with saved me hours of slogging through possibilities. It also gave me the marketing tools to assist promote the workshops, saving me much more time.”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: YouTube’s AI slop takeover

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Meta buys AI startup Manus

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: World’s smallest autonomous robots

• Today’s AI tool guide: Design higher web sites with Cursor’s recent editor

• Watch our last live workshop: NotebookLM for Work

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown