Meta's $2 Billion Manus Bet: Why AI Agents Just Went from Experiment to Infrastructure
147 trillion tokens. 80 million virtual computers. A few months of operation. Those numbers don’t just describe a successful startup—they describe infrastructure that’s already running at scale while most AI agent companies are still writing whitepapers. Meta just paid roughly $2 billion for that head start, and if you think this is just another acqui-hire, you’re missing what’s actually happening. What Manus Actually Built Before we get into why Meta cares, let’s talk about what Manus is. Imagine you need to research a complex topic—say, comparing healthcare policies across twelve countries, pulling recent legislative changes, and summarizing how they’d affect a specific demographic. You could spend three days doing that yourself, or you could hand it to an AI agent that breaks down the task, spins up the necessary tools, and delivers a structured report while you grab coffee. ...