Latest / In the Loop AI / China Blocks $2B Meta's Acquisition of Manus. It's Getting Real

Transcript

China Blocks $2B Meta's Acquisition of Manus. It's Getting Real · In the Loop AI

0:00
Speaker1: At the end of last year, Meta announced a $2 billion acquisition of an AI startup called Manus.
0:06
Speaker1: They make AI agents very similar to OpenCore, but they were founded in China.
0:10
Speaker1: Then in March recently, the two founders visited China on business and were
0:15
Speaker1: told that they couldn't leave the country.
0:17
Speaker1: Their passports were taken away from them and they were blacklisted from travel.
0:21
Speaker1: Then today, China revealed that they have completely banned the acquisition
0:25
Speaker1: deal by Meta and have requested that Meta reverse the entire deal.
0:30
Speaker1: Now, this is unprecedented from China. For the last 20 years,
0:34
Speaker1: they've happily accepted US capital, but this marks the turning point after
0:38
Speaker1: three years where China has built their own independent AI stack and they don't
0:42
Speaker1: need to rely on America anymore.
0:44
Speaker0: Yeah, those two people from that meeting last month, that was the CEO and the
0:47
Speaker0: chief scientist of Manus.
0:50
Speaker0: They got a summons from the Chinese
0:52
Speaker0: government body called the National Development and Reform Commission.
0:56
Speaker0: Basically, it's the agency that runs the country's economy. They go to the meeting,
0:59
Speaker0: they get questioned about the meta deal, and then they say, you are not allowed
1:02
Speaker0: to leave. Now, fast forward to today.
1:04
Speaker0: Four weeks, I will say, before Donald Trump was supposed to land in Beijing
1:06
Speaker0: to meet with Xi Jinping, China killed the deal. And they did so in one sentence.
1:11
Speaker0: They said, just undo it. The two men still can't leave.
1:13
Speaker0: So now, not only are the two people stuck in China, but the deal...
1:18
Speaker0: Meta has signed with manis is now
1:21
Speaker0: kind of in a weird gray area now for those
1:24
Speaker0: who aren't familiar with manis manis is meta's response
1:27
Speaker0: to open claw open claw is the claw it is the agentic system
1:30
Speaker0: that kind of runs your life for you it performs agentic tasks long form it has
1:35
Speaker0: context does memory it was a big deal for meta and now meta has this problem
1:39
Speaker0: on their hands where china is saying no when the reality is is there's already
1:42
Speaker0: an entire singaporean office set up and the ceo of manis is on the C-suite of Meta already.
1:48
Speaker0: So there's a lot to unpack here. There's a lot to unwind. The tension between
1:51
Speaker0: China and the United States has never been higher.
1:54
Speaker0: I mean, this is pretty unprecedented as it relates to the dynamics between these two countries.
1:58
Speaker1: Yeah, this all started around the time last year that Zuck started acquiring
2:03
Speaker1: or started doing his spending.
2:05
Speaker1: I think he spent in total around $25 billion, $15 billion, which was spent on just one single man.
2:11
Speaker1: But Manus was part of the spending spree. And the timeline on this is pretty
2:15
Speaker1: insane. I've got it pulled up here.
2:17
Speaker1: So in March in 2025, Manus launched their AI agent, right? And it's what you
2:21
Speaker1: just mentioned. It's like its own AI operating system.
2:25
Speaker1: And within like 24 hours or within seven days, rather, they had 2 million people on the waiting list.
2:31
Speaker1: And people were like, I remember this, reselling invite codes for like $1,500.
2:38
Speaker0: $1,000 is crazy.
2:39
Speaker1: I actually tried to acquire one because this is before AI agents existed.
2:43
Speaker1: This is before GPT and Claude had built their own agentic systems. Manus was the first.
2:49
Speaker1: So the founders, with all the success, was like, oh, we've got to kind of kill
2:53
Speaker1: the Chinese image so that Americans will use our product.
2:56
Speaker1: So they ended up moving from Beijing, where they were based,
2:59
Speaker1: to Singapore, and they raised a massive round from Benchmark Capital,
3:03
Speaker1: which is one of the biggest funds in America, I think it was like $70 million.
3:07
Speaker1: And within six months from then, they hit $90 million of revenue run rate.
3:12
Speaker1: So things are looking amazing. And they thought that they'd subverted Chinese
3:16
Speaker1: authority simply by moving their company to Singapore, which is obviously not in China.
3:21
Speaker1: Then in March 2026, China stops the Manus co-founders from leaving the country.
3:26
Speaker1: And today, they've blocked the entire acquisition. Now, the main question that
3:29
Speaker1: pops into my head, Josh, and I don't know if you're able to like answer this for me is,
3:33
Speaker1: are they able to actually do this? I thought the deal was already signed.
3:37
Speaker1: I thought the ink had already dried.
3:38
Speaker1: Like I'm kind of confused how they unwind a deal that's already been dealt.
3:42
Speaker0: I think this is where there's going to be a problem, right?
3:44
Speaker0: It's because like, like we mentioned, there is an entire Singaporean office
3:48
Speaker0: where there's over 100 workers who are from Manus working with Meta.
3:52
Speaker0: The CEO of Manus is on the C-suite in Meta.
3:57
Speaker0: There's a lot of already kind of like baked in progress that has been made after this deal.
4:02
Speaker0: And China pulling the cord creates a lot of tension. And I'm not sure where
4:06
Speaker0: this is going to land because does Meta want to actually go to war with China
4:11
Speaker0: to prevent this blockage from happening?
4:14
Speaker0: Maybe. This is a huge bet for the company and a big bet on the future of the
4:18
Speaker0: company, what this looks like.
4:19
Speaker0: They were starting to roll this out. It was very deeply integrated. It fell apart.
4:23
Speaker0: I don't know what's going to happen. This is actually a pretty insane story.
4:25
Speaker1: Okay. So there are like some crazy parts of this on both sides,
4:30
Speaker1: right? So for Meta, you've spent $2 billion.
4:33
Speaker1: You have hundreds of employees from Manus that now are under Zuck's employment.
4:38
Speaker1: Just to be very clear, it's like under the American company.
4:40
Speaker1: Inc has been sealed. The deal has been done.
4:43
Speaker1: Now, to your point, Manus is being used a lot in Meta.
4:46
Speaker1: But specifically, if you haven't used it as a user, it's being used by advertisers.
4:50
Speaker1: We spoke about this on a previous episode, I think like two weeks ago,
4:53
Speaker1: where Manus is being used by advertisers to spin up their advertising projects.
4:57
Speaker1: And it's actually resulted in a 30% quarterly jump in revenue alone,
5:02
Speaker1: just by people using Matters.
5:03
Speaker1: It's cut out a lot of repetitious manual tasks. So it's a very good product.
5:08
Speaker1: And just because you haven't used it doesn't mean it isn't valuable to Meta.
5:11
Speaker1: They're building it, it's implemented, it's core to their system.
5:14
Speaker1: Advertising is like a lot of Meta's revenue.
5:16
Speaker1: So now they theoretically have to unwind this. But I think the alarm bell that's
5:20
Speaker1: ringing for me, Josh, is China's never done this before.
5:23
Speaker1: They have never unwound a closed deal.
5:27
Speaker1: Let me repeat that again. They've never unwound a closed deal that they have
5:30
Speaker1: like signed off on that is all completely legal, which tells me that they are
5:34
Speaker1: now treating these AI assets, whether you want to call them workers, researchers,
5:39
Speaker1: The actual product itself as a kind of national asset.
5:43
Speaker1: And they're treating it as kind of like a geopolitical asset against the US.
5:47
Speaker1: They feel like if they don't own this thing, then the US is going to wipe them out.
5:50
Speaker1: So I started looking at like other parts or trends And I realized China's kind
5:55
Speaker1: of been like moving in this direction over the last couple of months.
5:59
Speaker1: Specifically, they've like refused to use NVIDIA's GPUs to train their own AI
6:05
Speaker1: models amongst the top Chinese AI labs.
6:07
Speaker1: And they've started mandating that all these Chinese labs start building and
6:12
Speaker1: using the AI models within the China itself and not really open sourcing or
6:16
Speaker1: open sourcing only parts of it, but not the research itself to the US.
6:20
Speaker1: So there's been this cultural shift where China now doesn't really depend on the U.S.
6:24
Speaker1: As they had before in the past or over the last six months.
6:27
Speaker1: They now kind of have their own independence stack. And I think that's probably
6:31
Speaker1: part of what is playing into this story today.
6:34
Speaker0: Yeah, man, I kind of feel so bad for Zuck because he's tried this over and over
6:37
Speaker0: to get this agentic system.
6:38
Speaker0: He first tried to buy Ilya's safe superintelligence, if you remember, and Ilya said no.
6:43
Speaker0: And then he went to another OpenAI co-founder. He went to Mira Mirati's Thinking machines.
6:47
Speaker0: She gave him a no. He reached out to perplexity. They gave him a no.
6:51
Speaker0: And then they wound up paying $15 billion for half of scale AI just to get Alexander Wang.
6:56
Speaker0: So they really were struggling to get some help in this agentic world.
7:01
Speaker0: They finally acquired it through Manus, and now they're having this huge problem.
7:04
Speaker0: And an important caveat that's probably worth mentioning is...
7:07
Speaker0: That it's a little disingenuous and I could see why China's upset.
7:11
Speaker0: Because, I mean, Manus started off in Beijing, then they transferred over to
7:15
Speaker0: Hong Kong, and then they transferred over to Singapore.
7:17
Speaker0: And this is because, I mean, American venture capitalists are not going to invest
7:21
Speaker0: in Chinese companies and China does not want to engage with American acquisitions.
7:26
Speaker0: So they moved to a neutral place.
7:27
Speaker0: When they did this, I think 80 Chinese employees were laid off.
7:31
Speaker0: All of the Weibo posts were deleted.
7:33
Speaker0: All of the new offices were opened up. Everything was a clean slate.
7:37
Speaker0: So the people who helped them get there, they were cut off.
7:39
Speaker0: They started fresh in Singapore. But now China's like, wait a second. No, no, no, no, no.
7:43
Speaker0: You started here. You are Chinese. You're coming back to us.
7:46
Speaker0: And what a disaster for Zuck. This poor company, they can't figure it out.
7:50
Speaker0: They're spending so much money.
7:51
Speaker0: They haven't been able to launch a good product. And they finally got Manus,
7:54
Speaker0: like you mentioned, who was selling these invites for thousands of dollars because it was that good.
7:57
Speaker0: And now it's ripped out from their hands. So really brutal turn of events.
8:00
Speaker0: And it's going to be fascinating to follow Meta and see how they react to this.
8:04
Speaker1: Yeah, I think that the playbook that Manus founders tried to pull off,
8:07
Speaker1: but failed at was, oh, yeah, if we just wipe ourselves or rather the premise
8:13
Speaker1: of the actual company HQ to another country, we can evade Chinese law.
8:17
Speaker1: But remember, China is more of a dictatorship in this sense.
8:21
Speaker1: And they were like, hey, you can't actually do this. So we can pull your passports
8:24
Speaker1: and unwind this entire deal because it is still effectively Chinese. It was founded in China.
8:29
Speaker1: Now, I just want to comment on China's AI strategy in general,
8:33
Speaker1: because I think it plays very well into this particular story today.
8:38
Speaker1: Manus doesn't actually own any AI models.
8:42
Speaker1: I don't know if you guys knew that or the people listening to this knew that,
8:45
Speaker1: but they're kind of like a wrapper over a bunch of different AI models.
8:47
Speaker1: And typically, the AI models that they would use are American AI models, right?
8:52
Speaker1: But since, well, actually, over the last seven days, China released three AI models.
8:58
Speaker1: I think it was DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6. I'm just retesting my a model knowledge here now, a Qen 3.6.
9:06
Speaker1: And people have heard about Chinese models all along, right?
9:08
Speaker1: They're like, oh, it's open source, but it's never as good.
9:10
Speaker1: These three models are at parity, if not as good, as Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.4.
9:18
Speaker1: So pretty much 90% of Frontier model capability or 95% of Frontier model capability
9:23
Speaker1: you could now access for free.
9:25
Speaker1: 100% open source, download, run it on your own devices or GPUs if you happen
9:28
Speaker1: to have a couple laying at home for whatever reason.
9:31
Speaker1: And they're all Chinese models. Chinese models are actually also being used
9:35
Speaker1: in a bunch of Silicon Valley startups who can't afford to kind of run and fine
9:40
Speaker1: tune their own models, which of course, Claude and GPT are close source.
9:44
Speaker1: So they can't actually do that.
9:46
Speaker1: And it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to train your own model.
9:48
Speaker1: So the point is, Chinese models are more accessible and more easily fine tuned.
9:52
Speaker1: So why wouldn't you use it if you could just access maybe 95% of frontier capability?
9:56
Speaker1: And a large reason for this is because China has started forcing their AI labs
10:01
Speaker1: to train on Chinese-made chips.
10:04
Speaker1: Now, I just want to spend a very quick moment to explain this. DeepSeek, Moonshot,
10:10
Speaker1: And Alibaba have been mandated by the Chinese authorities to not train their
10:16
Speaker1: AI models on NVIDIA chips.
10:19
Speaker1: Now, typically, America had banned China from buying the chips.
10:23
Speaker1: That got reverted, and America was like, cool, you can have these chips.
10:26
Speaker1: China said, nah, we're good. We're going to train our own chips to be better
10:29
Speaker1: so that we aren't reliant on America at all.
10:32
Speaker1: And it seems that Huawei specifically has caught up.
10:35
Speaker1: That's what all these latest models that I just mentioned are trained on and
10:38
Speaker1: are inferenced on. And now it seems like that gap has closed.
10:42
Speaker1: So it doesn't really matter.
10:43
Speaker1: This is worrying, from my perspective, at least, because America could keep tabs on China.
10:48
Speaker1: And now they're kind of given the opportunity to leapfrog us.
10:51
Speaker1: They have a heck ton more energy.
10:53
Speaker1: So this is like the alarm bells ringing from today's story. Like Manus isn't
10:57
Speaker1: just about like one startup. It's about China's entire strategy.
11:01
Speaker0: Yeah. And I mean, everyone knows the name DeepSeek now. DeepSeek was the ones
11:04
Speaker0: that released that paper early on, they kind of changed the game as it comes
11:08
Speaker0: to, I guess, like reasoning and AI models, where OpenAI kind of figured it out,
11:12
Speaker0: but DeepSeek realized it and then published it publicly and then everyone followed on.
11:16
Speaker0: DeepSeek has always been the frontier of this open source race.
11:19
Speaker0: And just on Friday, DeepSeek released V4, which is kind of a scary benchmark
11:25
Speaker0: relative to the other open source models.
11:27
Speaker0: I mean, I'm looking at the chart here and it actually performs better on a few
11:30
Speaker0: benchmarks than GPT 5.5,
11:32
Speaker0: which is OpenAI's brand new frontier model that just came
11:35
Speaker0: out last week and i mean just last week alone china
11:38
Speaker0: dropped three huge models we got deep cv4 which is
11:41
Speaker0: probably the flagship but then there was that new quen model the new kimmy model
11:44
Speaker0: they're publishing at a much faster cadence and you have to imagine that part
11:48
Speaker0: of this comes from just their their boldness and willing to distill the larger
11:53
Speaker0: models from the united states but also their capabilities to train these at
11:57
Speaker0: an increasing rate i mean they're clearly innovating on the software side but something's working on,
12:03
Speaker0: at this cadence with this type of power.
12:05
Speaker1: On that note, Gavin Baker put out an amazing analysis.
12:09
Speaker1: Did you watch the Duakesh episode where he's like grilling Jensen and Jensen
12:13
Speaker1: just says like, I'm not a loser, like NVIDIA is not this, right?
12:17
Speaker1: So Gavin Baker commented on this and he said, actually, Jensen makes a really
12:22
Speaker1: good point where the chips that NVIDIA builds are specifically built with the
12:29
Speaker1: understanding that the U.S.
12:31
Speaker1: Has a very limited amount of energy.
12:33
Speaker1: That's number one. Number two, that a lot of these chips are gonna be based
12:37
Speaker1: on pre-training, which is like the part that comes, I guess,
12:41
Speaker1: before post-training, obviously.
12:43
Speaker1: But the point is, it's like a large training run, right? It's the bulk of the expense.
12:47
Speaker1: Now, China took a different approach. They said, well, we're not energy-constrained.
12:51
Speaker1: We have 3X more energy than the U.S.
12:53
Speaker1: And also, we think that building the best AI model happens after pre-training,
12:59
Speaker1: so in the post-training thing.
13:01
Speaker1: Now, one thing that Dario Amode of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI have announced
13:07
Speaker1: with their latest models, including Claude Mythos, is inference has been the
13:10
Speaker1: key to unlock a smarter model.
13:12
Speaker1: So they're confirming what the Chinese has also confirmed.
13:14
Speaker1: And so the reason why Chinese chips specifically are doing so well is because
13:18
Speaker1: they're designed around inference.
13:19
Speaker1: So the architecture for a Chinese chip, if you were to try and train like a
13:23
Speaker1: US model, looks very different.
13:25
Speaker1: And it actually wouldn't work. The hardware actually kind of delineates at this point.
13:29
Speaker1: So China, although it seems like we're competing, is building their own kind
13:32
Speaker1: of like stack themselves that wouldn't necessarily operate or work in the US.
13:36
Speaker1: And I think that's a story that most people like aren't addressing at this point.
13:39
Speaker1: And we're giving China the freedom to go do that right now.
13:43
Speaker0: Yeah, that perhaps talks to like the increased velocity, right,
13:45
Speaker0: that they've been having is because they're not spending that much time on pre-training.
13:48
Speaker0: They're all in on inference, all in on distillation.
13:51
Speaker0: And we've kind of seen this, I guess,
13:54
Speaker0: A way that you could track this back to something that we've seen is how something
13:57
Speaker0: like GPT 5.7 Nano will actually be far more superior than the following model,
14:05
Speaker0: even though it's cheaper and smaller.
14:07
Speaker0: And it's because it takes advantage of this distillation. And we see this all
14:09
Speaker0: the time where with Nano Banana, Google's image generation model,
14:13
Speaker0: Nano Banana Nano, like the small one, was actually better than the pro one,
14:17
Speaker0: even though it had much less model weights.
14:19
Speaker0: And I think what we're seeing here is a lot of innovation on that inference
14:22
Speaker0: side, on just like a faster compute.
14:25
Speaker0: And Google's been addressing this recently. They split their most recent TPU
14:28
Speaker0: into two, one just for pre-training, one for inference.
14:30
Speaker0: It's clear that China is very much over-indexing on inference.
14:33
Speaker0: And right now, that's where a lot of the gains are happening.
14:35
Speaker1: I just wanted to pull up this post because you just reminded me of something.
14:39
Speaker1: For those of you who say like no one uses Chinese models, the answer is just you're wrong.
14:45
Speaker1: So Kimi K 2.6, which was released last week, and it was actually the first model
14:49
Speaker1: of the three models that we mentioned, DeepSeek v4 was the last one,
14:53
Speaker1: Is now the number one most used model on OpenWriter.
14:56
Speaker1: OpenWriter is this website where you can basically get access to all the models
14:59
Speaker1: sometimes before they actually officially release, and it can track token usage.
15:03
Speaker1: Now, token usage is the metric that you can kind of track to figure out
15:08
Speaker1: which model actually is worth its weight in gold and what are people using it for?
15:13
Speaker1: OpenRapta reveals that Chinese models take the number one spot almost the entire time.
15:17
Speaker1: And part of that is probably because a lot of the closed-source models don't
15:21
Speaker1: want to reveal their full metrics.
15:22
Speaker1: But the point being is the token usage of Chinese models have now surpassed U.S.
15:27
Speaker1: Token consumption, at least from publicly available data.
15:30
Speaker1: So the data would then indicate that these Chinese models are obviously getting
15:34
Speaker1: not only better, but more accessible to any and all developers that want to
15:37
Speaker1: use it. It's not just enterprises that use it.
15:39
Speaker1: It is just open source developers or just developers that can't afford to train
15:44
Speaker1: or pre-train their own models.
15:45
Speaker1: So the Chinese models are way more powerful at this point. They've almost caught
15:49
Speaker1: up to parity with the US models.
15:51
Speaker1: I think this probably suggests, if I had to guess, that the next couple of iterations
15:56
Speaker1: of Chinese models will probably end up leapfrogging some of the US ones.
16:01
Speaker1: This is just a guess from my end. And so it'll probably switch to becoming closed
16:05
Speaker1: source. I can't see China wanting to open source these things or continue to
16:09
Speaker1: open source these models if they're doing things like unwinding Manus deals
16:12
Speaker1: and trying to keep the assets on mainland China.
16:15
Speaker0: Well, you know who's probably happy about these open source models doing well?
16:19
Speaker0: And I'm like, this is a sneaky one, but probably Jensen.
16:22
Speaker0: And after I watched that interview that he had with Dorkesh,
16:26
Speaker0: I think one thing that became clear to me is that open source models benefit
16:30
Speaker0: NVIDIA more than anybody else.
16:32
Speaker0: And I think that's why NVIDIA has really been leaning in heavily to be the leader
16:37
Speaker0: in the United States, at least in terms of open source AI,
16:40
Speaker0: because it requires the world to train on an open hardware stack,
16:46
Speaker0: right? If everyone is...
16:48
Speaker0: Creating these models and they're publishing the weights, you can train them on NVIDIA GPUs.
16:52
Speaker0: Closed source models, like someone like Anthropic or OpenAI,
16:56
Speaker0: who we're seeing really heavily sway towards moving to TPUs or accelerators
17:01
Speaker0: that are not made by NVIDIA, they have the ability to build this whole custom
17:05
Speaker0: stack built on hardware that isn't NVIDIA's.
17:08
Speaker0: And that seems to be like a real threat to the NVIDIA platform.
17:11
Speaker0: So when Jensen got a little bit heated on the podcast, I have a,
17:18
Speaker0: Open source really benefits them. It makes everyone want to use NVIDIA chips.
17:21
Speaker0: The second these closed source models win, and if everything becomes closed
17:24
Speaker0: source, there's a strong bias towards these closed loop kind of hardware stacks
17:30
Speaker0: that NVIDIA is no longer in the loop on.
17:32
Speaker0: And that could create a little bit of an issue for the company.
17:35
Speaker1: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. In this interview,
17:38
Speaker1: actually, for those of you who haven't watched it, definitely go watch it.
17:40
Speaker1: Jensen says, or was asked, hey, you dominate on GPUs. Why don't you move up
17:46
Speaker1: the stackers and dominate there as well.
17:48
Speaker1: You obviously know so much about how this is going to play out.
17:50
Speaker1: And he answers very simply, I am so hyper-focused on GPUs and the hardware architecture,
17:56
Speaker1: and this is the game I want to play, dominate, and own, right? That was his response.
18:01
Speaker1: So he's hyper-focused on winning GPU architectures and selling the picks and
18:06
Speaker1: shovels for this entire race.
18:08
Speaker1: NVIDIA also announced Nemo Claw, which is their enterprise version of Open Claw.
18:14
Speaker1: Now, you might be asking, okay, why is NVIDIA launching that?
18:17
Speaker1: Why are they launching a bunch of open source models, which seemingly like no one is using?
18:21
Speaker1: It's to your point, he wants to push adoption of AI in general,
18:24
Speaker1: whatever is built on top of his NVIDIA GPUs will demand more NVIDIA GPUs in
18:30
Speaker1: the future. And that's how he's going to make this money.
18:31
Speaker1: And guess what happened at the end of last week, NVIDIA once again surpassed
18:35
Speaker1: a $5 trillion market cap, they went above, then they went below.
18:38
Speaker1: And now they're sitting pretty above it. So his plan is paying off.
18:42
Speaker1: He couldn't explicitly say clearly on the podcast that I'm going to make a lot
18:46
Speaker1: of money if I sell GPUs to China.
18:48
Speaker1: Obviously, he can't say that. It's in poor taste. It would go against the philosophical
18:51
Speaker1: argument that he was making. But that is the truth, ultimately.
18:54
Speaker0: Yeah. So the Game of Thrones is getting a little weird now because now we're
18:58
Speaker0: seeing direct combat in a way between China and the United States.
19:02
Speaker0: We're seeing a lot of that happen just domestically across these companies.
19:06
Speaker0: It is getting higher and higher stakes.
19:09
Speaker0: And you could see as the stakes get higher, people get a little more emotionally
19:12
Speaker0: charged. People make larger decisions.
19:14
Speaker0: And China pulling the rug on this deal sets a pretty crazy precedent.
19:18
Speaker0: I mean, this has never happened before where they've actually interfered with
19:21
Speaker0: something on a material scale.
19:22
Speaker0: $2 billion is a lot of money. and it's been months that
19:25
Speaker0: they have been integrating madness into the platform now meta
19:29
Speaker0: if they do decide to actually unwind this deal is kind
19:32
Speaker0: of sitting in a little bit of an uncomfortable position because
19:35
Speaker0: they still haven't released their product and they now
19:38
Speaker0: don't have a clear path to getting a claw-like operating
19:42
Speaker0: system for their software that has all this
19:44
Speaker0: rich data about all its users so we'll be following the story closely
19:47
Speaker0: we'll be following the china story closely we will be testing out
19:50
Speaker0: all these models including deep seek v4 which i haven't had a chance to play
19:53
Speaker0: around with but seems like it's pretty powerful and i think that's probably
19:56
Speaker0: the update for for china right now it's just kind of wait and see like we have
20:01
Speaker0: this news that came out we're going to see how meta responds we'll see how china
20:04
Speaker0: responds and if they're actually willing to unwind this deal for the sake of
20:07
Speaker0: doing what the chinese government wants.
20:10
Speaker1: Yeah, can we get a response from Meta, please? It's been like 12 hours since this announcement.
20:16
Speaker1: And I'm on the Manus website right now. It says Manus is now a part of Meta.
20:19
Speaker1: So they haven't updated it yet.
20:21
Speaker1: They've probably got a ton of lawyers putting together a response.
20:25
Speaker1: But if you're listening to this from Meta and you want to give us Undisclosed
20:27
Speaker1: information via an anonymous tip, our DMs are open. Feel free to reach out.
20:32
Speaker1: But it'll be sad to see something like this go. I think OpenCore started a movement.
20:37
Speaker1: Manus is probably number two. Maybe Anthropics called Cowork is number two as well.
20:42
Speaker1: But it is a good enough product and it gave Meta the upper hand.
20:45
Speaker1: They were actually making money from this thing. So it's sad to see it happen.
20:48
Speaker0: I have a question for you, EJS. So Trump is going to China in like two or three
20:53
Speaker0: weeks to meet with Xi Jinping.
20:55
Speaker0: So how important of a topic do you think this is? Like, is this something that
20:59
Speaker0: would be raised to that level?
21:01
Speaker0: Is Trump going to discuss this with Xi Jinping to try to work out a deal?
21:04
Speaker0: Like, is AI and meta that important that this acquisition go through?
21:08
Speaker0: I think that's going to be an interesting thing to follow too.
21:10
Speaker0: Like, does this become a topic on the debate table between the two of them?
21:13
Speaker1: Okay. So I don't have a tinfoil hat, but I'm putting it on, right?
21:17
Speaker1: To answer this question. Okay, cool.
21:20
Speaker1: I think China is going to use this as a bargaining chip, pun intended,
21:24
Speaker1: to get access to bleeding edge NVIDIA GPUs.
21:28
Speaker1: I think this is a chess move, right?
21:30
Speaker1: Because right now, NVIDIA is selling them GPUs, but they're like the old ones.
21:35
Speaker1: They're the ones like in the warehouse share, the discarded items, right?
21:38
Speaker1: They want to like keep China on a leash. I think Xi Jinping is going to go to
21:42
Speaker1: Trump and say, hey, listen, we can do this ourselves, but we're willing to pay
21:47
Speaker1: for your GPUs as long as you give us access to the best one. no frills.
21:51
Speaker1: And I think he's going to use this as a bargaining chip. Otherwise,
21:53
Speaker1: we're not going to take any more investment from America. Yeah.
21:56
Speaker0: That could be. It's going to be an interesting dynamic. We'll see.
21:59
Speaker0: I love that this has elevated to the global stage.
22:01
Speaker0: This is now the single hottest topic in the world. So we will be here to follow
22:05
Speaker0: it as always. Thank you guys so much for watching this episode.
22:08
Speaker0: I hope you enjoyed. We had an episode that just released yesterday talking to
22:12
Speaker0: the founder of USVC, an interview, a rare interview with the general partner
22:17
Speaker0: from this fund that gives you access to Anthropix, SpaceX,
22:21
Speaker0: OpenAI, a lot of the large stocks that you would want to be investing in pre-IPO.
22:25
Speaker0: That was pretty interesting.
22:26
Speaker0: And then we'll have a whole bunch of new episodes coming out this week.
22:28
Speaker0: So if you enjoyed, please don't forget to share with your friends,
22:30
Speaker0: like, comment, leave a message, give us a five-star review, whatever you want to do.
22:35
Speaker0: But as always, thank you guys so much for watching and we will see you guys in the next one.
22:39
Speaker1: See you guys.