Manus 2.0 Arrives With a New Architecture and Impressive New Capabilities

Manus is a Singapore-based private AI solution that you may recall from a Microsoft partnership last year. Regardless, its makers at Butterfly Effect have just released a major update that includes a new architecture, several new products, and sweeping new capabilities.

“Manus 2.0 is not a version update,” Butterfly Effect explains. “It’s a new architecture, new products, and new capabilities built around a fundamental question: What should the next generation of Manus look like?”

Here’s what’s new.

A new architecture. Manus 2.0 is built on the new Cascade AI harness and Butterfly Effect says it runs faster, consumes fewer tokens, completes tasks more quickly, and costs less than its predecessor.

Cloud computer. This is a dedicated environment in the cloud that comes at extra cost.

Automations. Manus 2.0 supports scheduled tasks you can set up with a prompt and then trigger with actions from email, calendar events, Slack messages, Notion updates, and more.

Manus Studio. This new shared workspace replaces the old Manus desktop app and provides project-based organization with project-specific context and AI agent integration. There are major updates to core capabilities like document, spreadsheet, PDF, slide, video, and website creation, plus coding and game making.

Video Editor. This new environment is built for 30 to 60 second videos. It provides a timeline, selectable clips, images, text, motion graphics, and audio, plus exporting capabilities, and you can ask Manus to work off your edits or just do the editing without any manual work. The Video Editor also has an Alchemy mode in which Manus acts as a creative director and uses video and code generation together and then you can still edit the results on the timeline as needed.

Game Dev. This new environment uses video, image, and coding models together to create multiplayer-capable games that start from playable templates and provides per-asset editing.

Remote Control. You can now control your computer from your phone using natural language instead of a tiny screen representing your desktop.

Cue. This is a new standalone app for personal AI agents for mobile and desktop, and the idea is that you give an agent a cue and it gets to work. Each agent has its own email, phone number, wallet, and computer, Butterfly Effect says, so it can send messages, pay within the budget you set, and see a task through on its own machine. It can also take your calls and leave you a summary in Cue.

Manus 2.0 is available now on the web, desktop, and mobile. Cue is available in early access and is free to use with an invite code for now; it is likewise available on the web, desktop, and mobile, with iOS coming soon. You can learn more about Manus on the Manus website. And you can learn more about Cue on the Cue website.