China's Manus AI Partners with Alibaba for Local Expansion

As the competition in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) intensifies in China, the popular autonomous agent Manus AI has joined forces with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s Qwen team. This collaboration aims to create a customized version of Manus specifically designed for Chinese users.

What Happened: Manus, which is a product of a startup called The Butterfly Effect that is backed by Tencent Holdings, announced this partnership recently, as reported by the South China Morning Post. The goal is to ensure that all functionalities of Manus operate using local models and infrastructure, although a specific launch date has yet to be revealed.

A spokesperson from Alibaba Cloud confirmed the partnership, stating that both companies are focused on developing open-source models and aim to foster broader AI innovation within China.

Why It's Important: Manus AI recently captured global interest with an invitation-only web preview that displayed its capacity to handle complex tasks. After the introduction of Manus, Alibaba also showcased its new AI reasoning model, claiming that it surpasses those from competitors like OpenAI and DeepSeek.

Manus AI has built upon models such as Anthropic's Claude and adapted versions of Alibaba's Qwen, now being compared to China's top AI leader DeepSeek.

Additionally, Alibaba's Qwen models, which have been open-sourced since August 2023, have led to over 90,000 derivative models globally, according to data from Hugging Face, a platform for AI and machine-learning development.

Furthermore, Alibaba’s wholesale marketplace division is targeting a complete AI adoption by merchants by the year 2025.

Price Action: Alibaba’s stock has seen a significant rise of 63.65% year-to-date. On the latest trading day, shares increased by 4.789% to $139.02 during regular trading, with an additional 0.97% gain afterward.

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